The List

(page 4 of 10)

THE  VEGETARIAN MANIFESTO

The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair

"And as for the other men . . . they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!"

The story: Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus blindly chases the American dream—all the way to the putrid stockyards of Chicago.

Why the book resonates: Upon arrival in Chicago—hub of the country's largest industry, meatpacking—a 26-year-old Upton Sinclair breezed through the doors of a hotel and declared: "I've come here to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement!" But as Sinclair discovered, it was not his battle against wage slavery that tugged at the public's heartstrings; it was the 30 or so pages describing meat processing that truly struck readers—right in the gut. The public outcry led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in June 1906, but even today, fecal matter turns up in ground beef. In an introduction to a centennial edition of The Jungle, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser wrote, "It is no fault of [Sinclair's] that the old lies have lately been repeated, that important lessons have been forgotten, and that somehow we now find ourselves back in the jungle, with an odd feeling of déjà vu."  

The author (1878-1968): Born in Baltimore, the son of an aristocratic Virginia drunk; educated in New York. Spent only seven weeks in Chicago researching The Jungle. Ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1933. Won a Pulitzer for fiction for Dragon's Teeth in 1943.
—N. O.

 
 

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