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

article that appeared in October 1906:

I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its
industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by
chance I had stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing
to the meat-supply of the civilized world. In other words, I
aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the
stomach.

The message of The Jungle was not lost on fellow socialists,
however. Jack London, a prominent socialist and best-selling
author, touted the novel in the pages of the Age of Reason:

Here it is at last! The book we have been waiting for these
many years! The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery! Comrade
Sinclair's book, The Jungle! And what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for
black slaves, The Jungle has a large chance to do for the
wage-slaves of today.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel,
troubled the nation's conscience with a painful portrait of the
evils of slavery. It was one of the many wedges that drove
Northerners and Southerners apart and brought on the war that
put an end to slavery in America.

The Jungle failed to arouse a similar response for the
"working men of America," to whom it is dedicated. Most
Americans in 1906 seemed to accept Rockefeller's claim that the
worker's sacrifice was part of God's design. Government
programs designed to protect workers on the job and during
periods of unemployment wouldn't arrive until the bleak days of
the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Yet the novel's failure to extend democracy to the workplace
is no reflection on Sinclair's abilities as a reporter. The
Jungle is a heartbreaking story of an immigrant family's
struggle to survive, and for that alone it is well worth
reading. But it is also a sound historical document of the life
and sufferings of factory workers during the early years of this
century.

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE: THE PLOT

The wedding feast of Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite,
immigrants from Lithuania, begins exuberantly and ends in
disappointment in the back room of a Chicago saloon. Most of
the guests are drunk and exhausted. The thought of having to
return to work in the stockyards in a few short hours further
depresses them.