SOURCE: Barrett, James R. Introduction to The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, pp. xi-xxxii. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

In the following essay Barrett discusses realism in The Jungle.

In late 1904 a brash young writer arrived in the industrial slums of Chicago's South Side. “Hello!” he announced, striding into the Transit House Hotel at the Union Stock Yards; “I am Upton Sinclair, and I have come to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the labor movement.” As Harriet Beecher Stowe had sparked the nation's conscience with her depiction of blacks' lives under chattel slavery, so Sinclair would call the world's attention to the plight of the “wage slaves of the Beef Trust”—Chicago's immigrant packinghouse workers. For seven weeks the young writer lived among the laborers and their families, carefully observing their lives at work and in the community. He took his meals at Mary McDowell's University of Chicago...