![]() ![]() How did those ingredients combine into an accepted version of events? Amidst all the greed and corruption in the age of the robber barons, some of the worst excesses could be found in Chicago's stockyards and rendering plants. "I aimed at the public's heart," as Sinclair later put it, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach." An awakening to the possibilities of reform. Yet while The Jungle's meta-narrative is neat and effective, the ingredients from which Sinclair created it merit closer inspection: The Gilded Age. As such, it also can be used to sum up the Progressive Era in a compelling and provocative way that is guaranteed to arrest the attention of even the rowdiest classroom with its gross-out details. The Jungle has become an important document in the rise of the regulatory state. These vivid descriptions of the meat industry created a certain narrative about the novel that has left its mark on the country's historical memory. But the novel’s few pages describing ghastly conditions in the city's meat-processing plants are the words that have burned themselves into the public mind – in a way that Rudkus and Sinclair's other characters never did. ![]() Set in Chicago’s tight-knit Lithuanian community at the start of the twentieth century, The Jungle’s central character, Jurgis Rudkus, is the archetypal immigrant worker, driving himself to the limits of endurance to support a family. ![]() Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1905) is a well-known novel that tells a seldom-remembered story. ![]()
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