The Jungle

Couverture
Independently Published, 26 mars 2019 - 392 pages
Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward-stories to make your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. "That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, puny fellows-but my back is broad." Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company's "Central Time Station" not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month-yes, many months-and not been chosen yet. "Yes," he would say, "but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms"-and he would clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles-"that with these arms people will ever let me starve?" - Taken from "The Jungle" written by Upton Sinclair

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À propos de l'auteur (2019)

Upton Sinclair, a lifelong vigorous socialist, first became well known with a powerful muckraking novel, The Jungle, in 1906. Refused by five publishers and finally published by Sinclair himself, it became an immediate bestseller, and inspired a government investigation of the Chicago stockyards, which led to much reform. In 1967 he was invited by President Lyndon Johnson to "witness the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, which will gradually plug loopholes left by the first Federal meat inspection law" (N.Y. Times), a law Sinclair had helped to bring about. Newspapers, colleges, schools, churches, and industries have all been the subject of a Sinclair attack, analyzing and exposing their evils. Sinclair was not really a novelist, but a fearless and indefatigable journalist-crusader. All his early books are propaganda for his social reforms. When regular publishers boycotted his work, he published himself, usually at a financial loss. His 80 or so books have been translated into 47 languages, and his sales abroad, especially in the former Soviet Union, have been enormous.

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