The Jungle - Sinclair, Upton

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Résumé :
This novel is the original and uncensored edition written approzimately in 1904. This cover was used in 1906 with the publication of the first commercial edition - less chapters and a less brutal description of both the working conditions and the production of miserable meat. As a muckraker, Upton Sinclair had no idea that this work of fiction would inlame the public and the politicians to the degree that it did. The story revolves around an immigrant worker and his family laboring in the slaughterhouses of Chicago and the iunhuman, slave like working conditions. It tells of the filthy and contaminated meat products produced in these disgusting factories. President Teddy Roosevelt read the book and immediately dispatched investigators to the heartland of America and as a result the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted. This novel laid more groundwork for the continuing labor struggles of the turn-of-the-20th century. Jack London said, Here it is at last! What Uncle Tom's Cabin did for black slaves. The Jungle has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood and groans and tears. It depicts not what man ought to be, but what man is compelled to be, in this our world in the twentieth century. It depicts not what our country ought to be, or what is seems to be in the fancies of Fourth of July spellbinders - the home of liberty and equality, of opportunity - it depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, and inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beast. The Jungle is Sinclair's most famous novel. He went on to write Oil which the 2007 award winning movie There Will Be Blood is adapted from and many other novels including the Pulitzer Prize winner Dragon's Teeth. Upton Sinclair, along with Jack London are truly the most important political fiction writers in American History. A Collector's Edition.

Biographie:
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878 - 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking expos? of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the free press in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him a man with every gift except humor and silence. He is also well remembered for the line: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. He used this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms. Upton Sinclair was considered a force of nature -- being not only prolific in his novel-writing but a political force of decided influence. Unknown to many of his admirers, Sinclair also wrote adventure fiction, under the name Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.