The Jungle

Upton Sinclair

Summary

The Jungle is a novel written by Upton Sinclair and published in 1906. It is a fictionalized account of the harsh working and living conditions of immigrant laborers in the meatpacking industry in Chicago in the early 20th century.

The Jungle caused a national uproar and led to significant changes in food safety laws and regulations. The book is often credited with helping to create the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both of which were signed into law in 1906.

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

Available since: 02/28/2023.

Contemporary Fiction

Other books that might interest you

Hogg

Samuel R. Delany

The narrator of Hogg is a Huck Finn–like youngster caught in society’s most sinister seams—but unlike Huck, he passes no moral judgments on the violence he takes part in . . .Hogg is the story of a man—a depraved trucker named Franklin Hargus, whom the people he works for call Hogg—and of the nameless boy who tells the story of three days of unspeakable sexual violence and devastation, which, together, they initiate in a small seaside American city in the middle of the last century. Hogg is a towering brute who makes his living as a rapist for hire. By the end of a series of vicious attacks, kidnappings, and mass murders, the reader will wonder who is more corrupt: the man or the boy.   Samuel R. Delany completed his first draft of Hogg within a day, if not within hours, of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City and revised it over the next four years, though it was not released until 1995.

Show book

Tender Betrayal

Rosanne Bittner

Stolen kisses and secret reunions lead to a passion that civil war cannot sever in this glorious historical romance from the bestselling author of Caress.   Beautiful, proud Audra Brennan feels like a stranger in a foreign land when she comes north from Louisiana to study music. But when she savors her first forbidden taste of desire in the arms of handsome lawyer Lee Jeffreys, his caresses spark a flame within her that burns away the differences between rebel and Yankee, all objections silenced by the fierce beating of two wild hearts falling impetuously, impossibly in love.   Suddenly cannon fire shatters the country. Principled, impassioned, and committed to a nation united, Lee answers the call to fight against the Confederacy, while Audra hurries home to a plantation shadowed by the darkening cloud of war. But in the most terrible of circumstances, can either afford to surrender their heart?   “Power, passion, tragedy and triumph are Rosanne Bittner’s hallmarks. Again and again, she brings readers to tears.” —RT Book Reviews

Show book