However, over the course of the next several months, the family becomes aware of abuses and corruption at the meatpacking companies.

They arrive in summer when the weather is warm, and Jurgis, Jonas, and Marija are all easily able to find good-paying jobs the family even purchases a house and begins making plans for Jurgis and Ona’s wedding in autumn. Initially, the United States is everything the family hoped it would be. They settle in the meatpacking district of Chicago-”Packingtown”-accompanied by Jurgis’s father Antanas, Ona’s cousin Marija, Ona’s stepmother Elzbieta, and Elzbieta’s children and brother Jonas. The narrative then flashes back to the couple’s meeting in Lithuania and their decision to emigrate to the U.S. Set in turn-of-the-century Chicago, The Jungle opens with the wedding of Lithuanian immigrants Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite. This study guide refers to the 2006 Penguin Books edition of The Jungle. would gradually adopt various labor reform laws over the next several decades, the Socialist Party never achieved the kind of success the novel predicted. In this, its legacy was more mixed although the U.S. Sinclair, however, hoped his work would inspire public sympathy for the plight of the working classes and generate support for the Socialist Party. Sinclair’s graphic account of the unsanitary and corrupt practices of America’s big meatpacking companies horrified the public to such an extent that, by the end of 1906, Congress passed two acts aimed at regulating the industry: the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established what would become the FDA.

As an exposé of this kind, The Jungle both exceeded and fell short of its author’s intentions. Although fictional, the work is often considered an example of “muckraking” journalism-turn-of-the-century investigative reporting that took aim at political corruption while advocating for progressive reform. The Jungle, first published in serial form in 1905, is a realist novel by American writer Upton Sinclair.

The jungle sinclair