In the following essay, Wade exposes evidence of Sinclair's misleading portrait of the area he called “Packingtown” in The Jungle, claiming that Sinclair overlooked many social and cultural facts.

In the following essay, Homberger analyzes The Jungle as Sinclair's first novel after his conversion to socialism.

In the following essay Barrett discusses realism in The Jungle.

In the following essay, DeGruson discusses the role of the Socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason in the publication of The Jungle.

In the following essay, Morris examines the character Jurgis's evolving representative function in The Jungle.

In the following essay, Rosendale explores Sinclair's use of landscape as symbolism of class status in The Jungle.

In the following essay, Derrick analyzes Sinclair's use of naturalism in order to explicate the gender roles in The Jungle.

In the following essay, Dawson examines Winston Churchill's 1906 review of The Jungle to discover the impression, sometimes extreme, Churchill gave of Chicago to his fellow Englishmen.

Although there are some critics who admire Love's Pilgrimage and Sylvia, and though there is much in both books to show the diversity of Sinclair's talent, it seems to me that King Coal (1917) is the first book after The Jungle to indicate his full power as a novelist of the social scene. If the people of the upper class are sometimes stiff and inhuman, the workers have great vitality; and so has Hal, the aristocratic hero. What is most impressive in King Coal, however, is the evidence that Si...

[Obituaries asked us] to remember "Uppie" for three achievements: (1) the Federal interest in food inspection stimulated by his 1906 work The Jungle; (2) his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program of the early Depression years; and (3) the anti-Nazi novel, Dragon's Teeth (1942), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. It was recalled also that for a generation Sinclair was one of the most feared and vilified homegrown Victorian Socialists in modern history. (p. 173) Generally overlooked ...

Van Wyck Brooks's criticism of Sinclair's novels [see excerpt above] was that they create a mood of self-pity—that they invite a workman to feel sorry for himself rather than to develop his intelligence and study the world around him and the forms of action that are possible for him. The point is good, but it is not very relevant: Sinclair has scarcely attempted to interpret working-class life since The Jungle. His typical story is that of a rich young man who gets mixed up in the radic...

There are two general approaches which Sinclair makes in [his] novels. One is a close, documented study of the working of some specific economic mechanism; the other is a charge of general conspiracy for the maintenance and extension of privilege on the part of the beneficiaries of the system. The Jungle is relatively successful because it leans heavily on the former technique, though the charge of conspiracy is implicit throughout. The later novels are much more flabby and give the reader a sickening sense...