Upton Sinclair (1878–1968)

Jurgis Rudkus and his family emigrate from Lithuania to the United States because they live a very hard life and were told the wages are much higher here. What they were not told is that costs are also much higher, so the family ends up typical of the poorest of the poor. After having most of their money swindled in New York, they make it to Chicago to live in a single room in a fetid boarding house, from which all the family members can get jobs. With several incomes they make the smart show more choice to buy a house in the slaughterhouse district, the only place they can afford to live and work. This proves to be another swindle, as the house is falling apart, their interest is high, and if they fail to make a single payment they will be evicted. Their jobs in the slaughterhouses are incredibly difficult and dangerous. Men have life-threatening accidents every day, and the meat is rotting and full of toxic chemicals. The workers get sick with tuberculosis and other contagious disease often, but can’t afford to take time off, even unpaid, as they will lose their job. Family members die or go missing. Jurgis ends up in prison for beating a man who raped his wife, and when he gets out his wife dies in childbirth, the family is evicted, and his other child dies. Jurgis leaves them and becomes a tramp and then a thief. He becomes a vote fixer for the Republican Party, then the Democratic Party, and then a strikebreaker for the very union he used to belong to. After another stint in prison he returns to his two remaining family members, his wife’s stepmother and cousin, to find the latter has been trafficked into prostitution. One day, when looking for a warm place to loiter, Jurgis hears a speech by a great socialist orator. The words he hears reflect Jurgis’ lived experience, unlike any politics he's heard before, and offer him hope for the future and something to fight for. After the speech, Jurgis meets the speaker, who offers him a job as a porter at a hotel run by a socialist, where he thrives.

I had not ever read this classic before, and I'm very glad that I did. The descriptions of work at the slaughterhouse that are so famous are only in about a third of the book (the first third, which makes me wonder if some readers only get that far). Overall, the book is about the plight of immigrants, the poor who work so hard for nothing, and the lie of the American Dream. Jurgis and his family frequently lament that there's no such thing as freedom if you can't afford it, and they would not have been fundamentally worse off if they had stayed in Lithuania.
After the horrible things he's been through, socialism is a light at the end of the tunnel for Jurgis. He doesn't find utopia, he just finds a system that acknowledges him and cares about people like him and gives him something to look forward to. The ending is bittersweet from a modern perspective, as the socialists are so optimistic but the reader knows what will actually happen to the reputation of socialism over the next 115 years. The book does go a bit too far in trying to overexplain the nickels and dimes of how much different people will get paid for different tasks under socialism. Quit while you're ahead!
Cynics like to point out that the only change this book catalyzed when it was published was food safety, not socialism or worker welfare or a social safety net, but that's absolutely not nothing. The upper class aren't eating the rotten tubercular pork or the beef sausage full of rats and workers’ body parts - the workers and the poor themselves are. Food safety improvements help them most.
I often find that “classics” don't hold up as well as people claim they do, but this book is great and I'm so glad I finally read it. show less

I don't generally review the "classic" titles I read, because who the hell am I? But I wanted to tackle this one. Bear in mind that I seldom, if ever, enjoy a novel with a Message. The Jungle, of course, is the famous muckraking novel that brought the horrific conditions of the Chicago stockyards to the public eye. Good for it.

The protagonist is Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who personally faces every possible indignity that a worker could suffer under capitalism. The parade of show more horribles actually became funny after awhile: of course one of his relatives turns to whoring. Of course another is eaten by rats. Jurgis and the other characters are so thinly drawn, and the episodes so clearly crafted to make a point, that I felt no emotional involvement, not even outrage. Granted, if the book were telling me something I didn't already know, the outrage factor might have come into play, but I was reading it as a novel, not a report.

I have never read a book that more clearly called out for one more chapter. The book ends with Jurgis, homeless, hungry and freezing, stumbling into a socialist meeting. He is an instant convert to the cause and is taken in by the kindly socialist owner of a hotel. The last 20 pages or so consist of a group of men debating various points of socialist theory, and Jurgis disappears from the narrative completely.

But here's my ending, and it absolutely fits with the rhythm of the book. Throughout the novel, Jurgis plugs away against adversity and always thinks he has finally caught a break. Then the other shoe drops and life sucks once again. So, he falls in with these nice socialists and instead of a worldwide worker's revolution he encounters: Terror. Torture. The Gulags. Fooled again! show less

This is an astonishing book. One of the more astonishing things about it is that it was written 112 years ago. Many of the same things destroying America today, albeit in different areas today than in the meat packing industry of 1906, were already very much alive (and, unfortunately well) then. Sinclair's hope of changing the political thinking of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century did little more than encourage the passage of legislation protecting the food consumption of the show more Americans of his day. As he wrote himself, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit its stomach." Sadly, in spite of that moderate success, his socialist dream is no closer to becoming reality today than it was then. Nevertheless, Sinclair's hero, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, would be proud to know that there are still people willing to fight for those ideals today, however hopeless it might seem in America at the beginning of the 21st century. show less

Mind-blowing, ass-kicking, as fine a novel by as intelligent a writer as I have experienced. He begins with an innocent hopeful American immigrant, and by no contrived or shortcut process, pulverizes him, crushes him under poverty, illness, death, injustice, crime, foreclosure, despair, vengeance, every minute cruelty as can be packed into a page. He falters only twice: losing his suspension of disbelief when Jurghis accidentally "tours" the governor's mansion, and again losing the reader's show more loyalty by rescuing Jurghis into the kind and welcoming arms of the socialist movement. He effectively turns the last fifty pages of his book into a manifesto. What he couldn't quite nail through narrative, he abandons narrative to lecture. show less