"Cliff Notes - Jungle, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

UPTON SINCLAIR: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Can you remember the pressure that built up inside the last
time you had an urge to tell someone off? If you can, you'll
understand the fury that prompted Upton Sinclair to write The
Jungle in 1905.

Sinclair was a cheerful man; yet he loved a fight, especially
whenever he felt wronged or saw others being treated unfairly.
Instead of responding with physical force to injustice, however,
he would reach for his favorite weapon--a pen--and dash off a
book, an article, or a play to expose the wrongdoer. Or he'd
deliver a speech--or run for public office (in fact, in 1934 he
even came close to winning the governorship of California!).

Furious about the amount of control giant industries had over
people's lives at the turn of the century in the United States,
Sinclair believed that the greed of the men who ran them had
turned the American Dream into a nightmare for millions of
workers and consumers. And so he wrote The Jungle in 1905 to
alert the nation to the misery of American workers, and to
sketch a solution--socialism--to their problems.

Sinclair's work over the years (including more than eighty
books and numerous plays, pamphlets, and speeches) was largely a
record of his political passions. With his writings he hoped,
literally, to change the world. So, in order to understand The
Jungle, it's helpful to look at the author's life and at the
world he wanted to change in 1905.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878,
Sinclair grew up there and in New York City as the only child of
poor but proud parents. His mother was the daughter of a
well-to-do railroad executive; his father was the son of a U.S.
Navy captain, who fought and died for the South during the Civil
War. Unfortunately, Upton's father, a liquor salesman, drank
away most of his earnings, and "home" to this sad family was a
succession of boarding-house rooms.

Whenever his father failed to pay the rent, a frequent
occurrence, Mrs. Sinclair would take Upton to her father's
house or to the home of her wealthy sister. The contrast
between his own family's poverty and his relatives' wealth
bewildered him. "Mamma, why are some children poor and others
rich?" he remembered asking his mother. "How can that be fair?"
As Sinclair noted in his autobiography, those questions would
never stop haunting him:

Readers of my novels know that I have one favorite theme, the