Upton sinclair: “jungle” Done by: Izbosarova N. O. Linguistics group 7 Upton Sinclair

Upton sinclair:
“jungle”
Done by: Izbosarova N.O.
Linguistics group 7
Upton Sinclair, in full Upton Beall Sinclair, (born September 20, 1878, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died November 25, 1968, Bound Brook, New Jersey), prolific American novelist and polemicist for socialism, health, temperance, free speech, and worker rights, among other causes. His classic muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) is a landmark among naturalistic proletarian work, one praised by fellow socialist Jack London as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.”
Sinclair’s parents were poor but his grandparents wealthy, and he long attributed his exposure to the two extremes as the cause of his socialist beliefs. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1897 and did graduate work at Columbia University, supporting himself by writing jokes for newspapers and cartoonists and adventure stories for pulp magazines. His first four books—King Midas (1901, first published the same year as Springtime and Harvest), Prince Hagen (1903), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), and a Civil War novel Manassas (1904)—were well received by the critics but did not sell well.
His public stature changed dramatically in 1905, after the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason sent Sinclair undercover to investigate conditions in the Chicago stockyards. The result of his seven-week investigation was The Jungle, first published in serial form by Appeal to Reason in 1905 and then as a book in 1906. Though intended to create sympathy for the exploited and poorly treated immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry, the novel instead aroused widespread public indignation at the low quality of and impurities in processed meats and thus helped bring about the passage of federal food-inspection laws. As Sinclair commented at the time, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Sinclair and his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, moved to Pasadena, California, in 1916. His muckraking novels continued with King Coal (1917), which is about the poor working conditions in the mining industry. With The Brass Check (1919), Sinclair tackled the financial interests and supposed "free press" principles of major newspapers and the "yellow journalism" they often engaged in to attract readers. His novel Oil! (1927) was based on the Teapot Dome Scandal (it loosely served as the basis of the Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood [2007]), and Boston (1928) was inspired by the Sacco-Vanzetti case. His searing novel The Wet Parade (1931; film 1932) is about the tragedy of alcoholism, and The Flivver King (1937) tells the story of Henry Ford and how “scientific management” replaced skilled workers in the automotive industry.
Inspired by a tour of the northern California redwoods in 1936, Sinclair wrote a children’s story called The Gnomobile. It was one of the first books for children with an environmentalist message, and it was later adapted as a film by Walt Disney in 1967. Sinclair again reached a wide audience with his Lanny Budd series, 11 contemporary historical novels, beginning with World’s End (1940), that were constructed around an antifascist hero who witnesses all the events surrounding World War II. For Dragon’s Teeth (1942), the third novel in the series, about the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s, Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
Of his autobiographical writings, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (1932; also published as Candid Reminiscences: My First Thirty Years) was reworked and extended in The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962). My Lifetime in Letters (1960) is a collection of letters written to Sinclair.
When The Jungle was published, its readers were outraged—but not in the way Sinclair had hoped. Their primary concern was food quality rather than the dangerous labour practices and cruel treatment of animals that Sinclair sought to expose. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he said. Using the public’s reaction to the novel, U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass both the Pure Food and Drug Act, which ensured that meatpacking plants processed their products in a sanitary manner, and the Meat Inspection Act, which required that the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspect all livestock before slaughter. The Jungle was also soon translated into dozens of languages.
What are the themes of the first four chapters of The Jungle?
The Dehumanizing Evils of Capitalism.
The Immigrant Experience and Disillusionment.
The Horrors of the Meatpacking Industry.
Family, Masculinity, and Individualism.
Labor Rights and Socialism.
The primary themes of the book revolve around the author's feelings that capitalism is bad and socialism is the answer. The author also shows us, through the family's struggles, the fallacy of trying to achieve the American Dream.
Sinclair was considered a muckraker, a journalist who exposed corruption in government and business.In 1904, Sinclair had spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. He first published the novel in serial form in 1905 in the newspaper, and it was published as a book by Doubleday in 1906.
The title of Sinclair's novel describes the savage nature of Packingtown. Jurgis and his family, hoping for opportunity, are instead thrown into a chaotic world that requires them to constantly struggle in order to survive. Packingtown is an urban jungle: savage, unforgiving, and unrelenting.