The Jungle by Upton Sinclari Jr. - 585 Words

Upton Sinclair was a well-known novelist from California. He and two other journalists, Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, were pioneers of a different kind of journalism known as â€Å"muckraking.† He was best-known for his novel, The Jungle, published in 1906. The novel uncovered the unfair and unsanitary conditions of the Chicago meat packing industry. In 1904, the editor of the socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, Fred Warren, gave Sinclair the permission to write a novel about immigrant workers in the Chicago meat packing houses. The owner of the journal, Julius Wayland, gave Sinclair a $500 advance to do research for The Jungle. The Jungle was a fictional booked about a young man named, Jurgis Rudkis, who got a job as a â€Å"gut shoveler† at Durham meat packing house, which was Armour in reality. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair also spoke about the filthiness of the packing houses. Rotten meat was covered in chemicals to hide the smell; rats climbed all over the wa rehouse, and left over animal parts were packaged as head cheese, used for fertilizer and even used as soap. Jurgis worked with people who had skin diseases, people who were always losing fingers as a result of the assembly line moving so fast, and people who constantly coughed spreading their germs all over the meat. There were few toilets, and no soap nor clean water to wash their hands with. These working conditions were unacceptable. Armour, Swift, and Morris were the three companies that dominated the business