Publisher's Synopsis
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is the ultimate muckraking novel, so ultimate that it constitutes the very definition of the term "Muckraking". This book describes all the great evils of society in 1906, starting with the child marriage of a girl not yet 16 to a much older man, then unsafe working conditions resulting to accidents and deaths, people who die because they cannot afford to pay a doctor, people who die of food poisoning because they eat unsafe meat. Men who abandon their families because they cannot stand it any more. Their women who are forced into prostitution as the only way to support their families, and then who cannot give up prostitution because polite society will find out their history and will not accept them back. All this is in one book! This book is studied and should be studied by students of American History because it is part of history. Because of the revelations in this book, a variety of federal agencies came into being. This book exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
