The Jungle

Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus arrives in Chicago chasing the American dream and finds instead the brutal, filthy machinery of the meatpacking industry — a world of exploitation, corruption, and unsanitary horrors that Upton Sinclair exposed in unflinching detail. Published in 1906, The Jungle was written to indict the treatment of immigrant workers, but it was the novel's stomach-turning descriptions of the food supply that seized the public's attention, leading directly to the Pure Food and Drug Act. Few novels in American history have changed as much, as quickly, as this one.