Upton sinclair, jr
Upton sinclair, jr. and the juUpton Sinclair, Jr. & His Novel: The Jungle
1878 - 1968
Upton Sinclair, the man who grasped America by the stomach. His famous novel The Jungle showed how the Progressive Era was a time where the meat packaging wasn't exactly the cleanest in Chicago. This is where the problem was brought up by Upton. In our essay we plan to discuss how The Jungle has goten its fame, before and after events all leading up to a conclusion of a bill, this law enforce stronger rules to inspect meat and to put all of the ingredients on a package label.
If we try to list the reasons why The Jungle has become a classic, we can show how much that fiction can become into a political reality factor. Historians also see The Jungle as one of the world's best
expressions of fury over man's cruelty to other men.
Upton Junior began his writing career as a college student. Before he was graduated from the City
College of New York in 1897, he had already sold many jokes and stories to newspapers and magazines. By the time he left graduate study at Columbia University in 1900, he had published ninety stories for magazines like Army and Navy Weekly. What turned Sinclair to more serious literature was an traumatic
religious experience. From his friendship with a young minister, Sinclair got a devotion to moral and social justice. The Reverend, W. W. Moir took the Gospels so seriously that he taught his students that a rich man had no chance of going to Heaven. When he gave Sinclair some works to read, Sinclair found them so contradictory to Moir's teachings, he lost faith in orthodox religion, but for the rest of his life he did believe in the moral teachings of Jesus. From that point on his writing became highly serious and idealistic.
Now finally unto the interesting part. The Meat Cutters' strike, 1904, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, with 56,000 members, demanded that the "Beef Trust" - Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and other great meat packing companies - grant a wage to all workers in all their plants throughout the country. The companies responded with an offer of a minimum wage for workers classified as skilled. The union saw this as a trick. They thought the companies would later "change" many skilled workers as unskilled. In July 1904,
packing-house workers struck in nine cities, 20,000 of them in Chicago alone. But the Trust imported strikebreakers and when the union established lines, the press reported that violence flared. The union soon exhausted its all money and the strike collapsed.
Upton Sinclair, who had followed the strike carefully in the newspapers, wrote an essay on the whole ordeal and that was published on many newspapers. He found it to be so interesting that he bought a patent to the book idea and decided to...
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