In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of opportunity,wealth, and freedom. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about "Packingtown," the busy,flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where New World visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the muckraking novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the century: the backbreaking labor, the injustices of "wage slavery" the bewildering chaos of urban life.

The Jungle, a story so shocking that it launched a government investigation, re-creates this startling chapter of our history in unflinching detail.Always a vigorous champion of political reform, Sinclair is also a gripping storyteller, and his 1906 novel stands as one of the most important--and moving--works in the literature of social change.

VERY FEW works of literature have actually changed the course of history, and critics have usually been suspicious of those that did. Compared to propaganda, literature usually influences life in subtle and indirect ways. It can alter our sense of reality and affect the climate of opinion, but books that create sensational controversies may well sacrifice the deeper purposes of literature to immediate effect, and they often appeal cheaply to the reader's emotions. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle,first published serially in 1905 and in book form in 1906, has an unshakable reputation as just such a work. It is remembered as a stomach-tuming expose of unsanitary conditions and deceitful practices in the meat-packing industry; as such it aroused the ire of a whole nation, from President Theodore Roosevelt on down, and it contributed enormously to the landmark passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. (The book is said to have decreased America's meat consumption for decades.)