The Jungle Essay & Criticism

The Jungle Critical Overview

Critics have never shown much agreement about the depth of Upton Sinclair’s talent as a writer. Some feel that he was, at best, a weak storyteller, who hid his inability to create believable characters behind his sincere effort for political reform, while others have suggested that it was his political agenda that made it hard to see just how talented he really was. Most critics admit that he was fairly talented, though not exceptionally so, and almost all grant that he was scrupulously faithful to the details he wrote about. Sinclair’s friend George Bernard Shaw, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, suggested to people who asked what had happened in his lifetime that they should not look to newspapers but rather should read Upton Sinclair’s novels. Bernard Dekle, who repeated the Shaw story in a 1969 article called “Upton Sinclair: The Power of a Courageous Pen,” considered the author a “superb journalist”:...
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