Who Is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?

The Jungle is a book about a young couple and several relatives that immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania in search for a better life. The young couple, Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, hold their wedding in a bar in an area of Chicago known as Packingtown. Packingtown is the center of Lithuanian immigration and of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. It is a hard, dangerous, and filthy place where it is very difficult to find a job. Jurgis and Ona discover, at their reception, that they are more than one hundred dollars in debt with the saloonkeeper. A custom in Lithuania is guests leave money to help cover wedding costs. The immigrants who came to the reception were low on money and didn’t leave any. Jurgis quickly finds work

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 20, 1878. He was born to an alcoholic liquor salesman and a strong-willed mother. He was raised on the edge of poverty but exposed to the upper class’ way of life through visits with his mother’s wealthier family. When he was 10 he and his family moved from Baltimore to New York City. Growing up he would spend every moment consuming the works of Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley, developing a strong intellect. When he was 14 he attended the City College of New York and started to sell children’s stories and humor pieces to magazines. He graduated in 1897 and enrolled at Columbia University and wrote novels to support his studies. He completed his schooling at the age of 20 and decided to become a serious novelist and a freelance journalist to support himself. In 1900 he marries Meta Fuller and had a son, David, in 1901. He wrote his first novel, Springtime and Harvest in 1901 but it was rejected. He continued to write but all the novels were more or less failures. His political beliefs lead him to his first success, The Jungle. In 1903 and 1904 he was sent to Chicago to write a segment for the newspaper Appeal to Reason about the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry. After several weeks of undercover research The Jungle began to form. It was initially rejected by publishers, but in 1906 the novel was finally released and the public was in shock.

The Jungle can teach us to be more aware of our surroundings and what is going on in our lifetime. It can also make us appreciate our lives better as we don’t have to suffer what the poor immigrants had to suffer. The book was written in the time period it deals with, the early