As Anthony Arthur explains in Radical Innocent, his biography of Sinclair, The Jungle is based on two months Sinclair spent living and conducting research in Packingtown, the Chicago neighborhood at the heart of the U.S. While The Jungle is a novel, it is not entirely a work of fiction. It’s been more than a century since the publication of The Jungle, yet the predation described by Sinclair still persists. This reading is often overlooked, yet it is worth remembering that sympathy for and solidarity with immigrants is at the heart of this seminal work of literature - especially amid the xenophobic atmosphere of the United States today, where the president has shut down the government over a border wall with Mexico, detention facilities hold untold numbers of immigrants, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stalk communities across the country. Within a year of the novel’s publication in 1906, Congress passed both the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, establishing the agency that would later become the Food and Drug Administration.īut aside from being the muckraking novel that led to the creation of the FDA or a socialist call to arms that went largely unheard, The Jungle is a story of how U.S. Instead, the novel ignited a national controversy over the unsanitary practices of the meatpacking industry. The quote, taken from his essay “What Life Means to Me” for Cosmopolitan Magazine, has come to be understood as Sinclair bemoaning The Jungle’s failure to galvanize a socialist revolution in the United States. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Upton Sinclair famously wrote of his novel, The Jungle.

The jungle book about meat