was born on September 20, 1878 and became an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle that was written in 1906. Before his success at the age of fifteen, he began writing to support himself and help pay his college expenses. During his college years, Sinclair encountered socialist philosophy, the influence of which is evident in his writing throughout his life, and became an avid supporter of the Socialist Party. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press " in the United States. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The intended audience for The Jungle was the general public, in an attempt to educate the people involved in what he portrayed in the story. The story takes place in the early twentieth century.
In the first chapter, a Lithuanian immigrant couple Ona and Jurgis, arrive in Chicago and wait to be married. They have their veselija also known as a wedding feast, being held in a small town called Packingtown in Chicago, which was in the center of a meatpacking industry. The highlight of the celebration is the acziavimas, which in the Lithuanian culture is known as when the guests link their hands, and form a rotating circle while the musician's play. During the celebration the men often put money into a hat to help pay for the wedding feast, which cost about three hundred dollars. Many of the guest leave without paying any sort of money and Ona gets worried about the total cost of the ceremony. If it means getting up earlier for work and working harder in Jurgis' eyes to pay for the bill, he will do it.
