Underlying Themes of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Within American literature, certain works stand as classics not only for the story contained within their pages, but also for the deeper social and political commentary that they make. Such is the case in Upton Sinclair's pivotal expose of the American meatpacking industry of the early 1900's, "The Jungle". Aside from telling a heart-rendering tale of immigrants trying desperately to patch together a semblance of the American Dream of which they heard so much before leaving their native lands, the work also, beneath the surface, tackles the weightier issues of why progressives and moderate socialists in the early twentieth century were concerned about the power and behavior of corporate of America and how they proposed to deal with the problems they identified and why they chose the solutions they did.

In this paper, an overview of "The Jungle" will be presented, as well as exploration into the underlying sociopolitical currents that drive the work and led to it's recognition as a classic of American literature.

Overview of "The Jungle"

The major underlying themes of Sinclair's "The Jungle" can only be fully understood and fairly evaluated after first knowing the plot of the work itself. The book clearly depicts the socio-economic strife and political turpitude that ushered America into the 20th century. While telling the story of Lithuanian immigrants struggling to survive in Chicago, Sinclair illustrates how avarice and ruthless competition were driving forces in the predatory capitalist "jungle" of America at the turn of the 19th century. This radical novel, described as muckraking by President Theodore Roosevelt, was a sounding board for pro-socialist politics (Miraldi).