In the following essay, Woodress explores Sin-clair’s motivation and methods in writing The Jungle, and notes of this novel, which provoked action from a figure no less influential than President Theodore Roosevelt, “No book ever published in the United States produced such an immediate response.”
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s one claim to a place in literary history, was not so much a novel as it was a tract for the times. Sinclair intended it not as a work of art but as an instrument for changing people’s minds. He thought of it as an expendable round of ammunition in the battle for social justice. The novel is better judged as propaganda than as literature, but it has compelling power and interests readers today long after the circumstances under which it was written passed into history......
