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

Spanish-American War in 1898.

To survive, workers in the meat-packing plants were forced to
take part in this horrendous fraud--one that affected nearly
every American. Moreover the poor and uneducated workers were
frequently swindled into buying furniture, houses, insurance,
and other things they couldn't afford, usually signing contracts
they couldn't understand.

SINCLAIR'S RESEARCH. Sinclair was a good reporter. He
checked and double-checked his facts. He talked with settlement
house workers--men and women who had opted to live among
Chicago's poor immigrants and help them "settle" in America.

Once he had the facts, he had to dream up people to "hang"
them on. He tells in his autobiography how he put together his
story:

Wandering about "back of the yards" one Sunday afternoon I
saw a wedding party going into the rear room of a saloon....
[Sunday was the only day the workers had free.] I slipped into
the room and stood against the wall. There, the opening chapter
of The Jungle began to take form. There were my characters--the
bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous
cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody. I...
began to write the scene in my mind, going over it and, as was
my custom, fixing it fast. I... stayed until late at night,...
not talking to anyone, just watching, imagining, and engraving
the details on my mind.

It was two months before I... first put pen to paper; but
the story stayed, and I wrote down whole paragraphs, whole
pages, exactly as I had memorized them.

Back in Princeton, the Sinclairs borrowed some money and
moved out of their one-room cabin into a farmhouse. Behind the
house, Sinclair set up a rickety cabin, 8 feet wide and 10 feet
long. He equipped it with a potbelly stove, a chair, and a
table, and began writing The Jungle on Christmas Day, 1904.

His experiences in Chicago had shocked him. Nonetheless, the
book's emotional energy, from the first page to the last, comes
primarily from Sinclair and his family's own suffering.

The Appeal to Reason began serializing The Jungle even before
it was finished. The weekly, published in Kansas, had about
500,000 subscribers, mostly farmers in the Midwest and West.
Readers began to write to Sinclair, and he saw he had a success
on his hands.