Upton Sinclair, a novelist, writer, journalist, political activist, and politician, was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1878. Sinclair began college at the age of 14 at the City College of New York. Sinclair aspired to be a poet, but eventually followed a different route. He began working on literary works that would cause major reforms in society. In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise in Chicago’s meat packing district to research his novel, The Jungle. Sinclair continued the tradition and wrote King Coal and The Coal War about Colorado coal fields. Sinclair’s literature continues to influence us today.
The Jungle is a muckraking novel exposing the challenging hardships immigrants in industrialized cities like the meat packing district faced in the early 20th century. Sinclair aims to show the reader the harsh injustices immigrants faced upon emigration into the United States. The thesis of Sinclair’s The Jungle is that capitalism is not good for everyone, and that socialism can fix the problems capitalism has created in American society. However, the major reforms that came from The Jungle were reforms in the meatpacking industry such as the Meat
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He vividly described the unkempt messiness of the meat packing factories, going as far as to say that men “made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.” The colorful descriptions of the factories left a heavy impact on America as a whole, as seen in the passing of the Meat Inspection Act. One of the major flaws of this book was the seemingly forced ending. Rudkus goes through years of toil and hardship, and supposedly finds the light at the end of the road in socialism. It was obvious to me when reading that Sinclair was a strong proponent of socialism, and I was disenchanted with the whole story after the