The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is a muckraking novel that exposed and documented the horrific conditions of Chicago stockyards in the early 20th century. According to The Health Anthology of American Literature "The underlying theme of the novel is of a political and social nature, illustrating the industrial exploitation of immigrants who were forced to work under unpleasant conditions." .
"The Jungle's influence on the "real world" is extraordinary for a literary work. Sinclair's 1906 landmark novel is credited with awakening the widespread public fury that led to the rapid passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), a watershed in consumer protection and government legislation (Norton)".
Sinclair traveled to the stockyards of Chicago in winter of 1904, to investigate the conditions of the meat packing industry. "The city of Packingtown was then the great maw of American capitalism. That is to say, it took resources and raw materials from everywhere and converted them into money at an unprecedented rate. Hogs and steers, coal and iron, were transmuted into multifarious products by new and ruthless means. The Chicago system created almost every imaginable kind of goods. But the main thing it consumed was people. Upton Sinclair tried to elucidate and illuminate the ways in which commodities deposed, and controlled, human beings. His novel is the most successful attempt ever made to fictionalize the central passages of Marx's Das Kapital", according to the Atlantic Monthly.
Immigrant labor in the early 20th century was a harsh reality that many looking for new opportunities in America had to deal with. To these immigrants, a successful future looked optimistic from their homelands. What they didn't know was that when they arrived, their future in the meatpacking industry would be a brutal one, with many shortcomings. When Sinclair describes the thousands of people waiting to just get a chance at getting employment, he shows that the naturalistic nature of the packing yards.
