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The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition

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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.

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" and "commercial," in other words, is the very version that Sinclair approved, the one that his socialist readers subsidized, and the one that he fought to bring before a wide public without sacrifice of "blood and guts."

In her introduction, De Grave holds that the 1906 edition was politically vitiated, that it "skirted the realities of disease and death among the poor" and "apologized to the rich and powerful by its silences." This misimpression arises from a grave analytical error. De Grave presumes that because, say, a given passage condemning capitalism was excised, the resultant novel somehow excuses capitalism. For the most part, however, Sinclair was pruning away duplicative material. It is an absurdity to allege that The Jungle, recognized by millions as one of the leading social novels of the twentieth century, apologized for the rich or overlooked disease and death among the poor.

Equally fanciful is De Grave's contention that Sinclair watered down the novel's "ethnic flavor" by modifying its Lithuanian spellings and terms. She makes a great deal, for example, of Sinclair's adjustment of a minor female character's name from Aniele Juknos to Aniele Jukniene. This "telling alteration," declares De Grave, made "the name less Slavic by adding the Romance-language ending." In actuality, Sinclair was rectifying a blunder. Jukniene is the married feminine form of Jukna; "Juknos" was erroneous. In his meticulous new linguistic analysis Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle (2006), Giedrius Suba
ius, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes, "The Lithuanian language of the 1906 edition would have looked quite correct, accurate, and standardized to contemporary Lithuanians, unlike the first newspaper edition of 1905, which contained many more dialectal features, inconsistencies, and mistakes."

The Jungle was revised, not suppressed. It was published precisely as Sinclair wished. Its refashioning was not ruinous, and Sinclair emended it voluntarily, not under duress. The 1905 text of The Jungle is best understood not as pristine and superior, but as an unevenly executed rough draft produced in great haste. Sinclair truncated it for aesthetic reasons. The result was a more concise text that retains the novel's political, ethnic, and naturalistic sensibilities while eliminating some of the tedious didacticism of the first draft. (Most literary critics still believe there's too much of that in the novel, as it is.)

Rewriting abounds in literary history. Charles Dickens, for example, altered the ending of Great Expectations, serialized in 1860-1861, when it appeared as a book, yielding to the entreaties of his friend, the playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth all published different versions of identical works.

There is value, to be sure, in having the 1905 version of The Jungle available in print. It contains, for example, explicit elaborations upon the "jungle" as a metaphor for capitalist civilization, as well as a direct mention of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a model for The Jungle. We need an authoritative scholarly edition of The Jungle that would demarcate precisely which passages were cut or altered between its 1905 and 1906 versions, with an introduction explaining, in a measured way, the significance of the changes. In the meantime, we have the See Sharp edition, hyperbolic to the point of irresponsibility.

Ironies abound in this situation. A radical publisher betrays suspicion of change. A supposedly truer text is promoted with claims contradicted by the evidence. An edition of a novel that indicts capitalism repeatedly for fleecing gullible consumers is advertised misleadingly. A publishing house that accuses all others of crass commercial motives happens upon a cash cow it is unlikely to relinquish.

The failure of the American left is less a result of censorship than of a paucity of ideas capable of winning over new audiences not yet committed to the cause. The left will never transcend the culture of capitalism unless it forgoes stratagems that advance neither social justice nor historical truth. The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves.

Author's addendum (July 19, 2006): This morning I was going over some old research files and came across a personal letter written by Upton Sinclair in 1958. Here Sinclair states in clear, unequivocal language precisely what I argued in my article "The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." This letter provides strong--one might say conclusive--confirmation of the historical narrative I offered above.

"The book was finished at the end of 1905," writes Sinclair, "and was not published until June of 1906. It started as a serial in the weekly Socialist paper, `The Appeal to Reason,' which at that time had a circulation of something like three-fourths of a million copies. It published large installments, I would say at a guess about a newspaper page; so all my revelations concerning conditions in the packing houses had been put before a huge public early in the year. I had been offering the manuscript of the book to publishers in New York--I think to five--without result. They were afraid of it, and finally growing desperate I decided to publish the book myself. I got Jack London to write his tremendous endorsement of the book. I announced the publication in `The Appeal to Reason,' and I was taking in several hundred orders a week. I had the plates made and paid for. Then--I have forgotten how--it occurred to me to offer the book to Doubleday-Page; and they immediately accepted it and agreed to take over my plates and to let me have and sell my own edition." (December 1, 1958)

To recapitulate: After the serial version of The Jungle appeared in The Appeal to Reason in 1905, Sinclair, unable to find a mainstream publisher, decided to publish the book himself. He pared down the text and had "the plates made and paid for" himself. Then he received a contract from Doubleday, Page. That publisher, in turn, used Sinclair's self-prepared plates when issuing the book in 1906, while allowing Sinclair to issue his sustainer's edition simultaneously. In short, The Jungle was printed by Doubleday in 1906 not in a censored form but just as Sinclair wished--indeed, from plates he himself had prepared.

Bibliography

DeGruson, Gene. The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Memphis: Peachtree, 1988.

Harris , Leon . Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975.

Shore , Elliott . Talkin' Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Sinclair, Upton. A New Edition of The Jungle. Pasadena, California: Upton Sinclair, n.d. [1920].

--. American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932.

--. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

--. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1906.

--. The Jungle. New York: The Jungle Publishing Company, 1906.

--. The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 2003.

Subaius, Giedrius. Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2006.

Upton Sinclair Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. [The specific letter cited in the main article is to William McDevitt, 3 September 1930, and is found in Correspondence, Box 13. The letter cited in the addendum is to G. L. Lewin, 1 December 1958, and is found in Correspondence, Box 59. Both letters are quoted courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University.]

Addendum to original post: In a post above, an anonymous poster (one can guess who it is without too great an effort) states that my criticisms are explained by my editing of another edition of the novel. This is an ad hominem attack that merely muddies the waters. While my scholarship on another edition of the novel does explain how I came to have the knowledge to prove how distorted and false the See Sharp claims were, it is untrue that my objections have any commercial motivation whatsoever. If I wanted to sell more copies of my edition, there would be more time-efficient ways to do it than to criticize someone else's. Furthermore I have never criticized any other edition of the novel. My objections to the See Sharp edition are simply on the basis of its total lack of historical veracity. Read my full analysis, reasoning, and evidence -- and judge this matter for yourself.

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.

Sinclair's _The Jungle_ is best known for its graphic and grisly details of the meat packing industry and the hazzards its products presented the public. This is all true, and those who are interested in looking for these descriptions will not be disappointed in the original edition of the book. However, there is another side to the story, one that is frequently overlooked: the social cost of industrialization, and the de-humanization of the labor force.

Equally horrifying to the processing of the food is the abominable working conditions and maladies those who worked in the packinghouses suffered - from those who de-boned shanks (with thier stubs of a thumb), to the workers who removed the hides from the caracasses (their hands all but eaten away from the chemicals they worked in) - and the list goes on and on ... not to mention the daily struggles the immigrants faced, at constant risk of being swindled or abused.

Sinclair was a socialist, and his political leanings are apparent in his classic book - yet this does not detract from the story; in fact, I would argue it only strengthens the force of his words. It is a marvelous read, but you'll never look at a hotdog the same again.

This powerful and highly political story by Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) focuses on the tough life of immigrants to Chicago in the early 1900's. Jurgis Rudkus is a strong and hard working newcomer from Lithuania, but he's soon worn down by his exhausting labor in the city's once-burgeoning stockyards. Every time another burden befalls his impoverished family, his response is to say that he will work harder - which is no answer. Eventually his family split ups because of the burdens and hardships they face in a cold-hearted city where unskilled immigrants worked long hours for poverty wages.

Sinclair wrote the book hoping to promote socialism and help for the poor. But it was his searing description of unsanitary meat-packing practices - sawdust, poisoned rats, and dirty rain water all ground into your hamburger - that infuriated the public and led Congress to establish the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to inspect the nation's food supply.

I gave this novel four stars because it drags in places. Still, "The Jungle" provides a searing description of life among poor immigrants and meat-packing practices in the first decade of the 20th Century.

This is a mostly compelling read for the first 300 pages, but then as we read on the book disintegrates before our eyes.

This book must have been a blockbuster when it came out. In one fell swoop it attacks the meat packers of Chicago, the great manufacturers, safety in the steel mills, corrupt politicians, the police, dishonest real estate developers, and on and on. The novel is a vehicle for the political and socialist Sinclair to espouse his theories. He describes the life of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants in 1900 era Chicago, working mainly in the packing industry.

The novel misses the mark as a great work because it spirals out of control toward the end. The first 200 pages are a riveting and are a compelling read. I could not put the book down. But the writing is not as good as say for example Saul Bellow or Hemingway. Also, some parts are lectures where the author explains his philosophy. Finally, the author seems slightly removed or isolated from the characters. Having said that, it is a great story to a point, maybe up to between pages 200 to 300. Then author loses his way in making a great fictional novel about people.

In retrospect the book becomes too political at the end, too much of a period piece and the author has trouble formulating the last 100 pages. That problem at the end comes through loud and clear when you read it. The author wrote it in sections for serial publication in a magazine, and that seems to be the problem with the book. The end of the book, or the last instalment, does not match the rest of the book.

Conclusion: great period piece that falls apart at the end of the book in political-socialist rhetoric.

I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle the summer after my first year of law school and although I felt over-worked and tired from my first year of intense studies, that feeling changed immediately after begginning this book. I realized how easy we have it today when I compared my life to those of the immigrants in Chicago's meat processing industry. 18 hour days for pennies an hour, severed limbs, and no chance at owning property - that was the life at the turn of the 20th century for the meat packers of Chicago.

I found myself cheering for the characters when they got a promotion, then felt extreme anger and frustration at their next inevitable pitfall. The book will get at you, no matter how tough your skin, but that's the sign of a good book as far as I'm concerned.

This is an immensely important book, both for its unique historical significance (few people of that time ever cared to set foot in the packing towns, let alone write a book on the filth, violence, poverty, and corruption) and for Upton Sinclair's brilliant storytelling. This is one of the best told stories about one of the worst situations overlooked by the ruling class of our country. Let it stand as a reminder to us all of what must not be allowed to happen [again] in a civilized society.

This is the sort of book I crave. No matter that it was written almost 100 years ago; human nature does not change quickly. Sinclair's chilling, desperate look at an immigrant family's struggle to survive in Chicago's Packingtown rings true even in today's age, when workers fear layoffs, redundancy, and the uncertain futures that lay beyond.

This was a brave book to write in 1906, when society still believed in absolutes. The common conception was that the poor suffered through their own ignorance, laziness, and lack of thrift. Sinclair points out that these sufferings were caused by the fact that wealth and opportunity belonged to a select few, leaving everyone else at subsistence and survival level. Thank God for Jacob Riis, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and others who had the fortitude to scrub off the gilt and tell it like it was.

This welcome offering of the original, unexpurgated version of Sinclair's The Jungle bears the following quote on its back cover, by Jack London:

"Here it is at last! What 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for black slaves, 'The Jungle' has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood and groans and tears. It depicts not what man ought to be, but what man is compelled to be, in this our world in the twentieth century. It depicts not what our country ought to be , or what it seems to be in the fancies of Fourth of July spellbinders--the home of liberty and equality, of opportunity--it depicts what our country really is, the home of oppression and injustice, a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts."

It's hard to disagree with Mr. London. (The www.Amazon.com pic doesn't do the excellent new cover design justice, either: it looks washed out in the pic, whereas in reality the colors are much more lively.)

One reading of this original version is enough to clue the reader in on why censors wanted Sinclair to prune the text: the picture it paints of American wage slavery, at its bloodiest and most unwholesome in the meat-packing industry, isn't flattering--to say the least. But far from simply describing inhumane conditions in a single industry, in a specific era, Sinclair paints a powerful metaphor for working class life in general. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants provide a bloody backdrop for the ruthless exploitation of man by man.

If Sinclair ever commited a sin worthy of the censors' ire, it was simply the sin of describing American life exactly as it was--and is. This is highly recommended.

This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. This book should be mandatory reading for all children, so they can learn while they're young how the world REALLY works. If we keep them naive and ignorant, we are setting them up to be victims. I think this book will encourage kids to study hard so they don't have to be trapped in low paying, unskilled jobs. Even today, there are still plenty of lousy employers who treat employees badly and exploit unskilled and low-skilled workers, not caring about their mental or physical wellbeing. Even today, there's still political corruption, and the news media still doesn't tell us much of the truth we need to know. This book and things such as Enron and the savings and loans scandal have made me a firm believer in government regulation of business. Without that, there are many rich people who would readily misuse their power to exploit, rob, and crush their employees and the public. Laissez-Faire capitalism is as bad of an idea as leaving the front door open while you go on vacation. This book has also given me a much better understanding of why we should not trust any politicians. I thought I could trust Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it turns out he's doing favors for his campaign contributors just like any other politician.