Living Conditions Of Immigrants In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Upton Sinclair wrote the novel The Jungle in hopes that the readers would be awakened to the terrible living conditions of immigrants in the cities around the turn of the century. His goal was to document the inhumane treatment of the working men and women in the industrial capitalism speaking out specifically about the unsanitary conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. During the period of industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, millions of poverty-stricken immigrants that flocked to the United States met with terrible working conditions and barely livable wages. Also, they encountered hostility and racism from the citizens of their new homeland. Their unfamiliar cultural beliefs and practices were viewed as a threat to the traditional
In the midst of the chaos of college, Sinclair was exposed to socialist philosophy. This, in turn, influenced Sinclair to the point where he joined the Socialist Party and all his writings were influenced by Socialism. After graduating in 1897 Sinclair wrote and published five novels which none had received much popularity. However in 1904 an editor from the well renown socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason asked Sinclair to travel to Chicago to record and document the lifestyle of stockyard workers. Having spent seven weeks in the city’s meatpacking plants, Sinclair learned countless details about the work itself. He also documented the home lives of the workers and the structure of the business. Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle was spawned from his research and was initially published in Appeal to Reason. The first few publishers whom Sinclair approached told him that his novel was too shocking, and he financed a first publication of the book himself. Eventually, however, Sinclair did find a willing commercial publisher, and in 1906, The Jungle was published in its