The Jungle

Description

In this powerful book, we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And, we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about packingtown, the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the muckraking novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turn of the century: the backbreaking labor, the injustices of wage-slavery, the bewildering chaos of urban life. "The Jungle", a story so shocking that it launched a government investigation, recreates this startling chapter if our history in unflinching detail. Always a vigorous champion on political reform, Sinclair is also a gripping storyteller, and his 1906 novel stands as one of the most important - and moving - works in the literature of social change.

Jane Jacobs is one of the most original economic and sociological thinkers of our day. Her books include the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities and, most recently, The Nature of Economies, both of which are available in Modern Library clothbound editions. She lives in Toronto.

"When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Sinclair's] novels." -George Bernard Shaw