The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition [Paperback]

Upton Sinclair (Author), Kathleen DeGrave (Introduction), Earl Lee (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown. When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social and political commentary. The text of this new edition is as it appeared in the original uncensored edition of 1905. It contains the full 36 chapters as originally published, rather than the 31 of the expurgated edition. A new foreword describes the discovery in the 1980s of the original edition and its subsequent suppression, and a new introduction places the novel in historical context by explaining the pattern of censorship in the shorter commercial edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This See Sharp reprint presents the whole text . . . essential for all libraries, especially at this affordable price."  —Library Journal 
 

"A must read. Recommended for all public, academic and junior through senior high schools."  —Kansas Libraries

About the Author

Upton Sinclair was a journalist and the author of over two dozen books, including The Brass Check, King Coal, and Oil!. He was a prominent social and political activist who narrowly missed being elected governor of California in 1934.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: See Sharp Press (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884365302
• ISBN-13: 978-1884365300
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 153 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "But I'm glad I'm not a pig!", January 2, 2004

By 

S. Calhoun "rhymeswithorange" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition (Paperback)

Originally published in 1906 by Upton Sinclair, THE JUNGLE sent shockwaves throughout the United States that resulted in cries for labor and agricultural reforms. It is indeed rare that a book should have such a political impact, but although Sinclair may have been surprised at the results, it is apparent while reading this novel that his words form a political agenda of its own. It should be noted that Sinclair was a devout Socialist who traveled to Chicago to document the working conditions of the world-famous stockyards. Sinclair originally published this book in serial form in the Socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. But as a result of the popularity of this series Sinclair decided to try to publish in a form of a novel.

Sinclair widely utilized the metaphor of the jungle (survival of the fittest, etc.) throughout this book to reflect how the vulnerable worker is at the mercy of the powerful packers and politicians. Mother Nature is represented as a machine who destroys the weak and protects the elite powerful. To illustrate his sentiments Sinclair wrote of family of Jurgis and Ona who immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania in search of the American dream. They arrive in all innocence and believe that hard work would result in a stable income and security. But they soon realize that all the forces are against them. During the subsequent years Jurgis tries to hold on what he has but he is fighting a losing battle. It is not until he stumbles upon a political meeting that his eyes upon the evils of capitalism and the sacredness of socialism.

If one is to read THE JUNGLE, then they should do themselves a favor and seek out this version. It is the original, uncensored version that Sinclair originally intended to publish. It contains much more details of the horrifying conditions of the meatpacking industry that Jurgis and his family were subjected to. I originally read the standard version of this book many years ago, but I didn't hestitate to invest in this edition as I wanted to read what Sinclair had originally intended.

THE JUNGLE is an important book on the labor history of the United States, the non-fairytale immigration of foreigners into the melting pot, and the history of Chicago. Recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

145 of 164 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Falsely Marketed Edition, August 12, 2006

By 

Christopher Phelps (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition (Paperback)

I wrote the below review-article for the History News Network (26 June 2006), and I share it here so that Amazon customers will know the truth about this flawed edition of this important social novel.


"The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle"

Christopher Phelps, The Ohio State University

When a small, Tucson-based publisher of anarchist and atheist literature called See Sharp Press issued a new edition in 2003 of Upton Sinclair's famous novel The Jungle, it was not especially remarkable. Editions of The Jungle, from the scholarly to the mass-market, are abundant. Generations of readers have been transfixed by the misery of the novel's protagonist, the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, in Chicago's gruesome meatpacking industry. No publishing house, it seems, has ever lost money on The Jungle--something that cannot be said of many other works of socialist literature.

The See Sharp edition, however, is extraordinary for its fanfare. Its subtitle proclaims it The Uncensored Original Edition. A slogan on the front cover, complete with exclamation point, denounces all competing editions as "censored commercial versions!" The back jacket touts it as "the version of The Jungle that Upton Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition--not the gutted, much shorter commercial version with which we're all familiar."

Inside is a foreword by Earl Lee, a librarian at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, who writes of "efforts of censors to subvert" The Jungle's "political message" and states that Sinclair "changed The Jungle in order to get it published by a large commercial publisher." An introduction by Kathleen De Grave, professor of American literature at Pittsburg State, suggests that Sinclair's alterations were "not driven by a desire for artistic economy" but "produced under coercion, directly or indirectly." The text restored by the See Sharp edition, she holds, is "closer to Sinclair's true vision."

Is it any wonder that reviewers have found it impossible to resist the romance of a forgotten, authentic, suppressed version of The Jungle? Library Journal, in classifying the See Sharp edition as "essential," deplores the novel's "butchering" and claims "Sinclair later wanted to reinsert the expurgated material for a full-length version but that never came to fruition" (April 15, 2003). The People's Weekly World, newspaper of the Communist Party USA, states, "If you have never read The Jungle, don't waste your time on the 1906 censored version. Go right to the original, now available, at a reasonable price, and feel and experience the real message that Upton Sinclair so deeply desired to convey to his readers" (May 29, 2004).

Just one problem: none of the sensational claims made on behalf of the See Sharp edition is true. The Jungle was not censored. Sinclair did not revise the text to meet the coercive demands of a commercial publisher. He never wanted the 1905 serial version to become the standard edition. And the novel, as eventually published in book form, has a political message that is perfectly clear.

First issued as a book by Doubleday, Page in 1906, The Jungle was a straightaway international bestseller. The See Sharp edition recuperates a lesser-known, earlier version of the novel. The Jungle was first published in serial form between February 25, 1905, and November 4, 1905, in The Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper with a nationwide readership edited by Fred Warren and published by J. A. Wayland out of Girard, Kansas. An almost identical text was published in three installments between April and October 1905 in One-Hoss Philosophy, a small-circulation quarterly also published by Wayland. The See Sharp edition reproduces the One-Hoss text.

The initial 1905 version of the novel had a different ending and was longer than the 1906 book known the world over as The Jungle. The former had 36 chapters, the latter 31. This redaction is the basis for See Sharp's charge that the novel was "gutted" or, as Lee puts it, "expurgated." According to De Grave, "since the socialists could not raise the revenue to adequately publish, promote, and distribute his book, the only alternative was to revise the novel in such a way that a capitalist publisher would accept it. ...Sinclair must have agonized over the revisions he made. They went against what he believed in, and what he'd seen for himself."

If this is so--if The Jungle was censored, if corporate perfidy forced Sinclair to make changes he did not wish to make--then a question arises. Why did he permit a bowdlerized version to be reissued, decade after decade?

Across Sinclair's ninety years, numerous editions of The Jungle were issued . Sinclair held the copyright. Yet every time the novel appeared, it followed the 1906 text. Sinclair self-published the novel four times (1920, 1935, 1942, 1945). He wrote introductory material for the Viking (1946) and Heritage (1965) editions. Further editions of The Jungle include Haldeman-Julius (1924), Vanguard (1926), Albert & Charles Boni (1928), Penguin (1936), Amsco School (1946), R. Bentley (1946), Harper (1951), World (1959), New American Library (1960), Dial (1965), Airmont (1965), and the Limited Editions Club (1965). If Sinclair yearned for the 1905 version and wanted to see it restored, why did he not insist upon its use in these many editions?

To settle this matter definitively requires passing beyond rhetorical questions, however, to a recapitulation of The Jungle's circuitous publishing history.

After turning out hundreds of pages of fiction week after week in 1904 and 1905, Sinclair was exhausted. He disliked the end result, a work he considered long-winded and rambling. "I went crazy at the end," he wrote in a personal letter in 1930 to a reader curious as to why many passages had been excised, "... and tried to put in everything I knew about the Socialist movement. I remember that Warren came to see me at my farm near Princeton, and I read him the concluding chapters, and he went to sleep. So I guess that is why I left them out of the book!"

Sinclair began to abbreviate the text. He corrected the Lithuanian references, changing, for example, the name of the main character from Rudkos to the more typical Rudkus. He sought to streamline the novel, making it less repetitious and didactic. At the same time, he ran into problems with Macmillan, a major publisher that had advanced him a contract for book rights following serialization. Macmillan, Sinclair later recalled, demanded that he eliminate the "blood and guts." Although he strove to pare down the text, Sinclair was unwilling, on principle, to compromise the novel's brutal realism. The Macmillan arrangement disintegrated by autumn 1905.

Next Sinclair tried to persuade the Appeal to issue the novel as a book, but Warren and Wayland, although phenomenally successful at publishing socialist periodicals, felt ill-equipped to enter into book promotion and distribution. Sinclair then submitted the book to "five leading publishing houses" and watched as every one rejected it, a story he first recounted in a 1920 brochure announcing a new self-published edition of The Jungle.

Frustrated, Sinclair resolved to publish the book on his own. In a letter published in the Appeal to Reason (November 18, 1905), Sinclair criticized capitalist publishing and requested that readers help subsidize the printing costs by ordering copies in advance. He began to trim the work according to his taste and to have the book set into type. Then a surprise turn of events transpired: Doubleday, Page offered him a contract.

Sinclair was satisfied that Doubleday would not pressure him to make changes he could not accept. In a follow-up letter published in the Appeal (December 16, 1905), Sinclair alluded to "an offer from a publishing house of the highest standing, which is willing to bring out the book on my own terms." Because he had already accepted individual orders, however, Sinclair continued to invite donations and superintend the book's typesetting. He asked Doubleday to permit him to publish his own small concurrent edition. Their memorandum of agreement was signed on January 8, 1906.

Just one month later, in February 1906, Doubleday, Page put out The Jungle, and the book took the world by storm. Simultaneously, an edition of five thousand copies appeared under the imprint of "The Jungle Publishing Company." Its cover was nearly identical, except for an embossed addition: the Socialist Party's symbol of hands clasped across the globe. Pasted inside was a label identifying it as the "Sustainer's Edition." The Doubleday edition and this special edition were both issued in New York and printed from the same plates, as prepared by Sinclair.

Sinclair's memoir American Outpost (1932) corroborates this chronology: "I forget who were the other publishers that turned down The Jungle. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging, and determined to publish it myself. ...I offered a 'Sustainer's Edition,' price $1.20, postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars--more money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. ...I had a printing firm in New York at work putting The Jungle into type. Then, just as the work was completed, some one suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants. ...Doubleday, Page agreed to bring out the book, allowing me to have a simultaneous edition of my own to supply my 'sustainers.' The publication was in February, 1906, and the controversy started at once."

The version that See Sharp Press disparages as "censored"... Read more ›

73 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bigger Version with More Kick, July 4, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition (Paperback)

I first read Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel "The Jungle" about seven years ago. The author, a dedicated socialist during the turbulent times of industrial upheaval in America, wrote this novel to show the American public how bad the working conditions actually were in the packinghouses of Chicago. He also hoped to expose the poor treatment of immigrants and the shameless greed of big business. For all intensive purposes, Sinclair did succeed in raising awareness about the dangers of eating canned beef and other meat products that supposedly underwent rigorous government inspection and quality controls. "The Jungle" even inspired then President Theodore Roosevelt to institute stricter laws and greater administrative controls on the beef industry. Now, with the release of "The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition," it is possible to discover that Sinclair not only wished to show exactly how bad the meat supply really was, but that his most important goal involved revelations about the plight of the working poor struggling under the crushing weight of laissez-faire capitalism.

Jurgis Rudkos is Sinclair's protagonist here, a recent Lithuanian immigrant alighting on the shores of Chicago in search of the American dream of wealth and prestige. Jurgis brings several relatives and his fiancée with him, certain that with a new job in the city he will soon wed and raise a family. Rudkos and company soon learn the reality of their situation upon reaching Packingtown, the slums that surround the beef factories like concentric rings of misery that even Dante could not have foreseen. The Rudkos clan doesn't speak English, so they are at the mercy of nearly everyone around them. Jurgis and several of his relatives manage to land jobs at the factories, but soon discover that these jobs are nightmares of depravity involving insanely long working hours, cruel bosses, low pay barely adequate for basic human needs, and filthy conditions. At first, Jurgis doesn't care how bad it is; he knows if he and the members of his family work hard they may eventually afford to purchase a house. This they do, but soon discover that the costs of insurance, interest, and taxes will keep them in a constant state of turmoil. If even one person in the family loses their job, the whole clan faces eviction and eventual doom. As the years pass, Jurgis and those he loves face one calamity after another. Lost jobs, dishonest government and vendors, disease, crime, and debt all take a devastating toll. There is little happiness residing in the pages of this book.

Sinclair's purpose with this book is to tout the panacea of socialism in a world that many increasingly saw as controlled by rampant big business. The last half of the story is essentially a socialist pamphlet singing the praises of the working class and how the people need to take back their institutions by reining in corporations. The author rebuts standard arguments favoring capitalism while presenting socialism as salvation incarnate. Whether you agree with socialist dogma or not, it is not difficult to understand why people favored such a worldview in an era when government regulation was non-existent or nearly so. Not surprisingly, unions get a fair amount of support from Sinclair to the extent that they are about the only organization willing to oppose the greed of the meatpackers. In short, "The Jungle" takes business to task while championing the little guy.

This new edition culled Sinclair's original text from a socialist organ entitled "Appeal to Reason." The author later tried to publish this version but ran into numerous obstacles from mainstream publishers who worried about lawsuits from the beef trust, the unsettling descriptions of factory life, and the author's unwavering support for immigrants. Sinclair eventually made the changes to the text in order to get the book published, figuring it was important to get some of the message out there then none at all. An introduction in this edition argues that the restored changes show how the author's focus was really on foreign workers, not necessarily the grotesque atmosphere of the slaughterhouses. Sinclair himself stated that he "aimed for the public's heart but hit them in the stomach instead." After reading this version of "The Jungle," it does seem as though the primary intention of the book was to emphasize the plight of Jurgis and the millions of other poor souls trapped in the insanity of a greedy industry. However, it is hard to read this book and not cringe over the lengthy passages outlining the disgusting practices that led to tainted meat and the spread of disease through such products as tinned beef. Arguably the most powerful section of the book discusses in depth the results of a strike in Chicago involving all of the meatpacking houses. Sinclair is at the height of his descriptive powers as he takes the reader on a tour of the factories locked in the throes of scab warfare and even more disgusting factory conditions. This is powerful stuff.

Nearly one hundred years after "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair remains the best remembered muckraker of the era. Having read both versions available, I have to conclude that reading either edition is equally effective. I only read this new treatment because I like to read unabridged or uncontaminated copies of any book. The uncensored edition adds about five chapters to the story, but it doesn't really make it that much longer since the chapters are all relatively short. Upton Sinclair fans will most certainly want to acquire this edition of the book to see what they have been missing all these years.