The Jungle Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Jungle Critical Essay #3

In his essay, Rideout explains how Jurgis’s conversion to Socialism by the end of The Jungle is believable, despite scholarly discussion of the system being out of place in the gritty novel.

Lincoln Steffens tells in his Autobiography of receiving a call during the early years of muckraking from an earnest and as yet little-known young writer.

One day Upton Sinclair called on me at the office of
McClure’s and remonstrated.

“What you report,” he said, “is enough to make a
complete picture of the system, but you seem not to
see it. Don’t you see it? Don’t you see what you are
showing?”

Having just been converted to Socialism, Sinclair was sure he “saw it,” and in the late autumn of 1905 his friend Jack London was writing to the Socialist weekly The Appeal to Reason in praise of a new...
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