“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Upton Sinclair declared this quote after writing his novel The Jungle. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intent of forwarding his personal agenda. He attempted to display the problems of capitalism by describing the awful working conditions of the average worker and convince the reader to embrace socialism. However, Sinclair did not achieve his goal; he succeeded in a different aspect. By describing the horrendous conditions…
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Sinclair offers socialism as the solution to his characters’ plights, but his suggestion falls short due to his abrupt abandonment of the plot and characters. Another factor that led to the failure of his proposal is his lack of realism when describing how socialism is the solution to the issues faced by his characters. The realism in Sinclair’s symbolism about hogs appealed to many readers’ emotions of pity and frustration; but…
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20 May 2014 American Literature Period B Balance of Power Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, published in 1906, brought to life to promote the riches of life under socialism where people owned and worked the earth in harmony. Exposing the life of an immigrant worker in a Chicago meatpacking plant that shocked the entire nation to the safety and labor practices in the rapidly growing business in a new nation of immigrants. “Socialism was the proper vehicle for righting the ills of mankind, and…
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is was nothing but one gigantic lie” (Sinclair). The lower class were stuck in an endless cycle of poverty, due to the fact that big business eliminated competition, which resulted in unrealistic prices and employees being treated as animals. Upton Sinclair’s belief…
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heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” This is one of the most famous statements in the 20th century by Upton Sinclair during the Industrial Revolution. The Jungle written by a socialist called Upton Sinclair. He took the book to the major publishers, but he was rejected because it was too shocking and depressing, so Upton Sinclair published it himself. He wrote “The Jungle” to raise sympathy for the fight of the workers being exploited by the capitalist system in the late 19th and early…
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Upton Sinclair's book “The Jungle” is a vivid portrait that exposes the appalling working conditions and the way American meat packing factories operated at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a grim look at life in the past that led to the federal government stepping in and making new regulations for the food industry, still in place today. It is Sinclair's remarkable contribution to literature and social reform that made this possible. This is one of the most impactful books on American history…
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The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the novel, he had completed his studies at Columbia University and was trying to develop a career as an author. He had been born in Baltimore in 1878, but his family had moved to the Bronx in 1888. Though he came from a prominent family, his own parents had little money, and…
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History 102 Biography Project: Upton Sinclair Sheila AdjeiMensah Mrs. KellyLuba March 25,2015 Period 6 Sheila AdjeiMensah Mrs.KellyLuba SUPA American History February 18th, 2015 Annotated Bibliography Websites *Denby, D. (2006, August 28). Uppie Redux? The New Yorker. Retrieved March 6, 2015, from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/28/uppieredux This online magazine article discusses the triumphs and downfalls of Upton Sinclair. It g…
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The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a leading “muckraker,” a group of early twentieth-century American journalists and writers who sought to initiate reforms by exposing social and political excesses and abuses, and The Jungle is one of the best-known pieces of the muckraker movement. Variously admired and excoriated by critics, the novel is responsible for bringing to light the appalling working and sanitary conditions of Chicago's slaughterhouses. Plot and Major Characters: The Jungle…
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Upton Sinclair remarked about his famous novel exposing the horrors of the meat-packing industry, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit in the stomach.” Sinclair began his writing career when he left college without a degree to live in a cabin in the woods to pursue his dreams of writing an idealistic novel. In 1902, Sinclair joined the Socialist Party and viewed its ideals as a more inviting alternative than the horrors of American capitalism (Commentary on Upton Sinclair, 1999)…
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