The Jungle
A Lithuanian immigrant family arrives in Chicago and is destroyed by the meatpacking industry: wages, rents, injuries, adulterated food. Sinclair had spent weeks in the stockyards, and the documentary detail is why the book still has force.
He famously said that he aimed at the public's heart and hit it in the stomach, because readers were more shocked by what was in their sausage than by what was happening to the workers. The last chapters turn into socialist propaganda, and they are much weaker than the first two thirds. Read it for the first two thirds.
Public-domain status
First published in 1906. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Upton Sinclair died in 1968, so the work enters the public domain there in 2039. Check the law where you live before reusing a modern edition, introduction or translation.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 140 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Chicago — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure