The Jungle
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Publisher Description
Upton Sinclair's classic novel The Jungle exposes the harsh conditions in which recent immigrants to the United States lived.
Jurgis Rudkus is a young Lithuanian living in Chicago, where he works as a labourer for a meagre living. Together with his family, who between them have only a modest command of English, he resides near the meat factories and stockyards. Falling prey to deception and con men, Rudkus and his family are made desperate by debt, and all must now work to simply survive.
Although fiction, this work is based off of first-hand research which Upton Sinclair personally conducted of industrialised inner city life. His particular focus was the meat packaging industry, within which Sinclair exposed filthy conditions by working incognito for a number of weeks on the factory floor.
His accurate descriptions of the unsanitary conditions shocked readers. The resultant public outcry in turn led the United States Congress to pass new legislation on sanitation in meat preparation. It is thus that The Jungle has been regarded as much a journalistic triumph as a fictional one. It also remains a popular example of Sinclair's passion for socialism, which he believed would lead workers away from exploitation and hardship, holding employers to standards of decency both in what they produce and toward those they employ.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in 1991 as part of a short-lived revival of the Classics Illustrated line, this adaptation of Sinclair's muckraking socialist novel succeeds because of its powerful images. When Kuper initially drew it, he was already a well-known left-wing comics artist. His unenviable task is condensing a 400-page novel into a mere 48 pages, and, inevitably, much of the narrative drama is lost. Kuper replaces it, however, with unmatched pictorial drama. The story follows Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkis and his family as they are eaten up and spit out by capitalism (represented by Chicago's packing houses). Kuper uses an innovative full-color stencil technique with the immediacy of graffiti to give Sinclair's story new life. When Jurgis is jailed for beating the rich rapist Connor, a series of panels suffused with a dull, red glow draw readers closer and closer to Jurgis's face, until they see that the glint in his eye is fire. Jurgis, briefly prosperous as a strong-arm man for the Democratic machine, smokes a cigar; the smoke forms an image of his dead son and evicted family. Perhaps most visually dazzling is the cubist riot as strikers battle police amid escaping cattle. Kuper infuses this 1906 novel with the energy of 1980s-era street art and with his own profoundly original graphic innovation, making it a classic in its own right.
