Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Jungle

The Jungle
The Jungle
Author: Upton Sinclair
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
reviewed on + 160 more book reviews


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.