In February 1905, newspaper Appeal to Reason—the most widely circulated socialist newspaper of the era—hired Upton Sinclair to report on wage slavery in Chicago's meatpacking industry. 

Sinclair spent seven weeks working in Packingtown, gathering meatpacking workers’ stories.

His desire to write the next great American novel and his appalling discoveries conceived The Jungle, a newspaper serial that followed a fictitious Lithuanian meatpacker, Jurgis Rudkus. 

[Chicago Eagle. 17 Mar. 1906.]

“Of ... all who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; ... it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. ... They would have no nails—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan.”

“Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one.​”

“The other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam ... their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats ... sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!​”

“Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing-machine, and tied to it for life.”

Excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Click for image caption.

After its newspaper run, Doubleday, Page & Co. published it as a book in February 1906.

[Watch the Professor. 1906.]

“There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage ... There would be meat that had tumbled  out on the floor, ... where the workers ... spit uncounted billions of consumption germs.There would be meat stored in great piles ... and thousands of rats would race about on it. ... These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. ... There were things that went into the sausage in  comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

[Upton Sinclair. The Jungle. 1906.]

[The Jungle Advertisement Poster. 1906.]

[All-Star Feature Corporation. The Jungle (1914). 1914.]

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