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25. The Jungle.
The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the
meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had
gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so
to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him—they had
worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had
thrown him away! And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these
unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience. There were
some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up
in other mills; there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for
instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The
vast majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless
packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some of
them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could
not keep up with it any more.
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906)
describes the lives of the working class in America by following Jurgis
Rudkus, who moves with his family from Lithuania to the US at the turn of the
century and then spends several years toiling in the slaughterhouses of
Chicago. The novel ends with Jurgis’s conversion to socialism, and Sinclair
hoped to inspire the reader to the socialist cause as well. And although the
socialist revolution in America didn’t play out as Sinclair imagined, his
novel did lead to major reforms in food safety legislation. It offers a lot
for Suzanne and Chris to chew on.
Show Notes.
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle.
[Gutenberg.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Also by Upton Sinclair: Manassas. The Brass
Check. Oil!
There Will Be Blood [trailer].
An article on the Helicon Home Colony.
The story of Sinclair’s run for Governor of
California.
The original serialized version of The Jungle.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
View all episodes
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma
4.8
3030 ratings
The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the
meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had
gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so
to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him—they had
worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had
thrown him away! And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these
unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience. There were
some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up
in other mills; there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for
instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The
vast majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless
packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some of
them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could
not keep up with it any more.
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906)
describes the lives of the working class in America by following Jurgis
Rudkus, who moves with his family from Lithuania to the US at the turn of the
century and then spends several years toiling in the slaughterhouses of
Chicago. The novel ends with Jurgis’s conversion to socialism, and Sinclair
hoped to inspire the reader to the socialist cause as well. And although the
socialist revolution in America didn’t play out as Sinclair imagined, his
novel did lead to major reforms in food safety legislation. It offers a lot
for Suzanne and Chris to chew on.
Show Notes.
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle.
[Gutenberg.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Also by Upton Sinclair: Manassas. The Brass
Check. Oil!
There Will Be Blood [trailer].
An article on the Helicon Home Colony.
The story of Sinclair’s run for Governor of
California.
The original serialized version of The Jungle.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
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