Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle originally to draw the public's attention to abuse of children and immigrants in factories along with v the effected that big businesses had on the economy. Worth his purpose fulfilled he also drew attention to a much more controversial attention to a much more controversial concern, being the meat packing industry. Many who read the book when it was first published were mortified by the stories. Some questioned the authenticity of Sinclair's writings. Whether the book was real or fake, it attracted the attention of everyone, including the government. This ultimately lead to the meat inspection act and the pure food and drug act. This ironically favored big businesses.
The novel begins with two Lithuanian
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Jurgis gets news from his cousin who struck rich in America and tell him how wonderful life is. Jurgis then gets a job offer and him and his whole family move to the new world to live a better life. The job offer was nothing more than a scam. Jurgis and Ona frightened now have to find a way in America. Jurgis assures Ona that everything will be okay and he searches for a job. He eventually finds one shoveling guts off the killing floor in a meat packing plant in Pakington, Chicago. Soon Jurgis and his family begin to see money hungry America for what it is. House hold expenses begin to take up Jurgis' entire pay check. Jurgis doesn’t understand why everything is so expensive and why the men in America are not just happy to be working. Sinclair then begins to describe the horrors of the meat packing industry and the awful health hazards that come along with it. With ill wages Jurgis and Ona are forced to postpone the wedding. To help cover expenses Elzbiata's chldren look for work. They eventually find jobs by lying about their age. Jurgis and Ona finally wed. Flashback …show more content…
The injured immigrants in the factories slowly start to die off including some of jurgis' family members. Those who did not die physically begin to die emotionally. Jurgis begins to see the American dream as nothing but a façade. Jurgis and Ona's family all have to start working just to get by. The dream is lost and desperation has set in. Jurgis' family is living off scrapes.
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore Maryland. He grew up both poor and wealthy this being possible because his parents were poor but grandparents were wealthy and he often stayed with them for extended periods of time. Sinclair soon left home completely and moved to New York after deciding not to have anything to do with his mother. There he pursued writing in college at the age of 14 (Lauren Coodley).
In 1904 Upton started writing about immigrants and the meat packing industry. This later lead to him being hired to write an expose for a socialist newspaper (Lauren Coodley). The expose later was written in book for and became The Jungle. The Jungle was very difficult to get published because of the controversial content but in 1906 in was published (Robert
Chapters 22-26: Chapter 22 begins with Jurgis leaving the household without saying a word. He flees by train into the country and begins to learn how to get by. He begins to make a good amount of money, but he spends it all on alcohol and women. Jurgis has lost who he once was, and he can no longer push himself away from the temptations that he used to fight strongly against. He later gets another job, gets a good amount of money, and spends it on alcohol again.
Sinclair thought that if one meat packing industry had all of those poor conditions, a lot of other meat packing industries did too, so he knew he had to do something about it. In 1906, Upton Sinclair got his novel called The Jungle published. The novel exposed the unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry. His novel became so popular
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair follows the main character Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania. Jurgis immigrated to the United States and made his way to Chicago in order to follow the path of a legendary hometown name, Jokubas, who supposedly made a lot of money in the states. Upon reaching the United States and arriving in Chicago they realized it would be much harder to establish an income in a city they weren’t familiar with. Their luck changed when they happened upon the infamous Jokubas and found out he ran a local delicatessen in the stockyards in Chicago. Jokubas helped them find a place to sleep for the night in a boarding house while they used those first days to look for work in order to move to a nicer place of living.
He never though he was going to get married, but in a horse festival he fell deeply in love with Ona. Jurgis is a hardworking man that enables him to find work with no problem while other are still standing in line he has found a job so easily. To celebrate Jokubas takes them to take a tour of Packingtown he takes them to the yard where there is a huge amount of cattle. Jokubas tells them all about them how are they weight, loaded on train then they are taken to the slaughterhouses, where they are killed and cut for food. The party continues and they end up in the meatpacking plant where they begin a tour of the factory.
The descriptions used in Sinclair’s novel about the meat industry and the way meat was produced gained the attention of politicians and
Every crisis Jurgis’s family encountered was primarily caused by money which the factory owner, the real estate, the doctor, and even the bartender fed on by taking advantage of the poor people. In the freezing winter, Jurgis himself lose his strength and became a wounded animal physically and mentally. Indeed, many times in the novel, Sinclair symbolized a human with a wounded animal, “…plunging like a wounded buffalo, puffing and snorting in rage” (75), “…helpless as a wounded animal, target of unseen enemies” (92), “…like a wounded animal in the forest; …forced to compete with his enemies upon the unequal term” (157). The same fate went with every other member of the family, especially Ona, she was always described as fragile as hunted prey as such she usually found herself in a position she struggles to help her family. However, she was full of love and support for her husband; it was not exaggerated to say she was the mental healing for Jurgis and a treasure that he swore to protect.
Jurgis gains a new perspective of everything around him and everything that has happened. The main character Jurgis Rudkus is an immigrant coming to America. He searches for a job to provide money for his wife and parents. In the article Schema Criticism by Mark Bracher, he emphasizes that, “Jurgis is the prototypical image of autonomy. He is powerful, exuberant, striking figure who towers above the other workers” (32).
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland in a small row house on September 20, 1878. In addition to this, from an early age he was exposed to differences that would have a long lasting effect on his juvenile mind and drastically influence his thinking as time progressed. Moreover, he was the only child to an alcoholic liquor salesman of a father, and a determined mother, he was raised on the premise of poverty, yet was also exposed to the advantages of the upper class through frequent gatherings with his mother’s wealthy family (biography.com). Equally important, is at the age of ten Sinclair’s father uprooted the family from Baltimore to New York City. During this time, Sinclair started to establish a sharp mind and was an insatiable
Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can
Isabelle Wilson Carey, Hour 1 14 January 2015 Social, Political, and International Repercussions of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” They were called floorsmen, trimmers, beefboners, or butchers. Stuck with the dirty work, these men hacked and sliced, severing jowls from shoulders from ribs. Backs hunched, they repeated the same motions, preparing these unidentifiable creatures for consumption. The danger of their labor was clear to them from the horrifying accidents they had all witnessed, however they had a job, so no one was complaining.
Innocent Belief Famously known for his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair changed American life in the early 1900s without a doubt through his literature. However, many don’t realize that Sinclair reformed American life in more than one instance, through more than one book. At times, he even reached beyond his realm of literature to discuss other needed adjustments. Besides the serendipitous changes he created for the meat packaging industry, Sinclair’s other actions throughout his life are, subjectively, important to American history, according to Anthony Arthur. In his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Arthur reveals his bias towards Sinclair, while supplying a relevant nature to his writing across an in-depth review of Sinclair’s
In chapter 14 the family by now knows the secrets of the meat packing industry. They cant speak out because they are afraid to lose their job. Jurgis starts to drink heavily now but it isn’t going to help. Jurgis’s son is going through some tough times just turning one year he is already suffering illnesses. Moving through the chapter I find out Ona is pregnant again; which is strange because they just had one about a year ago.
However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.
Jurgis started off firmly believing on his American dream of having a better life where he would work hard and earn lots of money. He took up work in a meatpacking plant where he had to sweep blood and body parts of slaughtered cattle. The job was unsafe and the conditions were bitter but he continued working a he was happy to get a job so fast. In the packinghouses the condition were deplorable, every part of the animal was used to make profit. Even spoiled meat was marked as good and sold out to public.
One of his novels, Dragon’s Teeth, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943, but his best-known novel was The Jungle. Upton’s novels, plays, pamphlets, and articles are all reflected on social themes, due to the fact that his main concentration was on social change. Growing up in a family of different backgrounds both economically and morally, he experienced situations that helped him grow as a person and develop his social ideas and themes for his literature, something which made him the trustworthy and likeable author he is remembered as