Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 303Upbuilders (1909). In his Autobiography (1931) he also recorded his evolution from
sensational reporting to the belief in a fundamental relation between the various
forms of corruption he discovered. Phillips, for his part, carried muckraking into
fiction. The Great God Success (1901), for instance, investigates American myth and
American practice, the idea of success and the pursuit of fraud; The Cost (1904) and
The Deluge (1905) expose the manipulation of the stock market; and The Fashionable
Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909), The Conflict (1911), and George Helm (1912) deal
respectively with national, municipal, and state corruption. A prolific writer, Sinclair
was to produce more than a hundred works, many of which could be seen as part of
the muckraking movement. Among his pamphlets and social studies were The
Profits of Religion (1918), which described the church as a capitalist tool designed to
oppress the poor, The Brass Check (1919), on journalism, The Goslings (1924), on
education, and Money Writes! (1927), on art and literature. Among his muckraking
novels were King Coal (1917), Oil! (1927), Boston (1928), and Mountain City (1930).
His fiction also includes a monumental series of eleven novels, beginning with
World’s End (1940) and ending with The Return of Larry Budd (1953), which
describes the adventures of the illegitimate son of a munitions tycoon who travels
the world and becomes involved in international political intrigues. But Sinclair
never surpassed the book that made him famous and stands as a monument to the
muckraking movement. The Jungle is an exposure of poverty and oppression; it is
also a darker vision of the immigrant encounter, and another America, than that
imagined by nearly all his contemporaries.
The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian peasant, and a group of his
relatives and friends, all immigrants, who live, work, and die in the stockyard indus-
try. At the beginning of the book, Jurgis is young, energetic, and optimistic. He is
fascinated by stories of America, “where a friend of his had gotten rich.” America, he
reflects, is a place where a man might earn “three roubles a day,” which would make
him wealthy. In addition, “in that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said”;
“he might do as he pleased and count himself as good as any other man.” So, Jurgis
resolves to go to this “place of which lovers and young people dreamed” because, “if
he could only manage to get the price of a passage,” he believes, “he could count his
troubles at an end.” Taking various members of his family with him, including his
new wife Ona, he sets out for Chicago. “It was in the stockyard that his friend had
gotten rich,” we learn, “and so to Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one
word, Chicago – and that was all they needed to know, at least until they reached the
city.” Sinclair carefully delineates how hope turns to confusion, and then eventually
to despair. Arriving “in the midst of deafening confusion,” the noise and bustle of the
big city, Jurgis and his companions are “utterly lost.” With few words of English, it
takes some time for them to find their way to the stockyards, Packingtown. And
what they find, as they approach them, is that the atmosphere grows “darker all the
time” and there is “an elemental odor, raw and crude” in the air. The vision is one of
hell. There is an “endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings” – the
tenements in which, Jurgis will discover, people are crowded sometimes “thirteen or
fourteen to a room.” There are larger buildings from which smoke billows, “thick,GGray_c03.indd 303ray_c 03 .indd 303 8 8/1/2011 7:54:26 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 26 AM