The Jungle - Sinclair, Upton

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Résumé :
In this 1906 novel, American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair sought to portray life as it really was for the immigrants living in Chicago and other large cities. Sinclair is especially known for unveiling the dangerous health violations and unsanitary processing practices of the American meatpacking industry of his day. The Jungle, which is based on an investigation Sinclair did for a socialist newspaper, depicts the hopelessness of the working class at its worst. Harsh and unpleasant working conditions, combined with poverty and lack of social support, all contributed to the discouragement of the poorly paid laborers of his day. In The Jungle, Sinclair contrasts the miserable life of the working class to the deeply rooted corruption of people in power. Sinclair gathered his information over the course of seven weeks as a worker in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. Although Sinclair's intention was to expose the inferno of exploitation of the typical American factory worker of his day, readers of his book fixated instead on food safety as the novel's most pressing issue. ?In the words of Sinclair, his celebrity from the book arose not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef. Sinclair's account of workers falling into rendering tanks and being ground along with animal parts into Durham's Pure Leaf Lard gripped the public. Public pressure resulting from Sinclair's book led to the passage of a meat inspection law and the establishment of a bureau which would later become the Food and Drug Administration. The Jungle remains one of the most successful muck-raking books of its time, and many years after.

Biographie:
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American author, sleuth, political organizer, and writer who was born September 20, 1878, and died November 25, 1968. He was the Democratic Party's candidate for governor of California in 1934. He put together almost 100 books and other types of writing. In the first half of the 20th century, Sinclair's writing was well-known and liked. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Sinclair became famous in 1906 for his classic muck-raking novel, The Jungle. This book showed how dirty and unsafe the U.S. meatpacking industry was, which caused a public uproar that helped pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act a few months later. He wrote a dirty book about American journalism called The Brass Check in 1919. It brought attention to the problem of yellow journalism and the limits of the free press in the US. Henry Ford's rise to power, including his wage reform and the Sociological Department at his company, is told in The Flivver King. It also talks about Ford's fall into antisemitism as editor of The Dearborn Independent. In the coal fields of Colorado, King Coal talks to John D. Rockefeller Jr. about his part in the Ludlow Massacre the year before....