Other Fiction Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle, v.1, 23 Dec 2007.

[Patricia]

A story of horrible exploitation in the Chicago meat industry. It may out you off spam and sausages forever.

From a review by Jon Blackwell:
“Upton Sinclair was a desperately poor, young socialist hoping to remake the world when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his Great American Novel.

He called it "The Jungle," filled it with page after page of nauseating detail he had researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished nation in 1906.

An instant best-seller, Sinclair's book reeked with the stink of the Chicago stockyards. He told how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as "potted ham."

In short, "The Jungle" did as much as any animal-rights activist of today to turn Americans into vegetarians.

But it did more than that. Within months, the aroused -- and gagging -- public demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry.

President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened after reading an advance copy. He called upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection standards for meat.”

[UncleDuke]

my second wife was a veggie, made me read the book, a week later i was back eating hot dogs and hamburgers

great book by the way

[Roy White]

I read it years ago. Really enjoyed it... But I wonder how much of it is strictly true.... He was a Socialist pushing an agenda. I"m really not trying to stir up a flame war i'm just wondering. No doubt much of it reflected actually conditions in the Meat packing mills and its publication righted many wrongs in that industry. It led to the creation of reforms and so on but I wonder...