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The Jungle

This book

was fact. Upton Sinclair visited Chicago in November 1904 to do

research for the book. Sinclair lived in a neighborhood called

Packingtown for seven weeks. While in Packingtown, Sinclair

interviewed workers, lawyers, doctors, saloonkeepers, and social workers.

The book deals with the greed and ruthless competition that turned

America into a brutal country, which Sinclair referred to as a "jungle."

The Jungle also tells how those at the bottom of the economic ladder, who

were wage-earners and their families, are at a great disadvantage in the

capitalist country. The wage-earners are slaves to the sudden wishes of

their masters, who are the capitalists who own and run private

industries.

The Jungle starts with the marriage of Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis

Rudkus in America, which was organized by Ona's cousin Marija. The

novel then flashes back to their lives in a rural Lithuanian town, and

how their families, Ona's stepmother Elzbieta, and her five children,

Jurgis' father, and four other adults, thought that America would be such

a great place to live in and decided to move to America. The day after

the wedding is over, everyone was back to work and Jurgis and Ona's

married life was cheerless. The pressures of work, poverty and illness

stifles the families spirits and then Dede Antanas, Jurgis' dad, dies.

After Jurgis gives his father an inexpensive funeral, he decides to join

the Union and begins to learn English and gets an unfriendly opinion of

democracy. Jurgis begins to see how the packers operate, they sell spoiled

or contaminated meat without remorse. Workers are exposed to awful

occupational diseases without protection. Then, Ona give's birth to a

baby boy. The families third winter in America starts with Jurgis

getting injured on the job and Jonas, Elzbieta's brother, disappearing,

leaving the families income to decrease by one third. When Jurgis

recovers and goes to get his job back, he finds it gone...