50 Fun Facts About The Jungle

Upton Sinclair said he aimed The Jungle at the public's heart and by accident hit it where?

"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," he wrote in October 1906, annoyed that readers worried about their dinner rather than the workers.

From which country, then part of the Russian Empire, do Jurgis Rudkus and his family emigrate to Chicago in The Jungle?

Lithuania, which is why the novel's wedding feast follows old-country rules and the family is fleeced by a realtor who speaks their language fluently.

How long did Upton Sinclair spend in disguise inside Chicago's packing plants before writing The Jungle?

Seven weeks in 1904, paid for by a socialist newspaper, was enough to fill a novel that later claimed roughly six months of total investigation.

Which socialist weekly from Girard, Kansas, funded Sinclair's stockyards research and first ran The Jungle as a serial?

Appeal to Reason printed the novel in instalments from February to November 1905, a full year before any book edition existed.

Which publisher finally issued The Jungle as a book in 1906, after five houses had rejected it as too shocking?

Doubleday, Page took it on just as Sinclair was about to print a cut-down subscriber edition himself; a Macmillan reader had called it "gloom and horror unrelieved".

What label did Theodore Roosevelt pin on Sinclair and other exposé writers, borrowing a figure from Pilgrim's Progress?

Muckraker comes from Bunyan's Man with the Muck-rake, who would not look up from the filth; Roosevelt meant it as a warning, yet Sinclair wore the label with pride.

Which 1906 law, signed the same day as the federal meat inspection law, is counted as the founding charter of the FDA?

The Pure Food and Drug Act put enforcement with the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry, renamed the Food and Drug Administration in 1930, and is nicknamed the Wiley Act after the chemist who pushed it.

What is Jurgis Rudkus's stock answer to every new bill and swindle in The Jungle, a line he first used back home?

"I will work harder" is what Jurgis said when an official seized his passport in the old country, and it becomes the refrain the yards slowly grind out of him.

By roughly how much did domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fall after The Jungle was published?

By half, which hurt the packers far more than Sinclair's politics ever did and gave Congress the shove that years of lobbying had not.

What does The Jungle call the stockyards district, so thick with children that a buggy could not pass a walk?

Packingtown, the novel's name for the district behind the yards, whose streets, Sinclair wrote, held so many children that no horse and buggy could move faster than a walk.

Which product did The Jungle say men who fell into rendering tanks ended up in, a claim inspectors never confirmed?

Durham's Pure Leaf Lard was the fictional brand, and the tale gripped readers even though Roosevelt's own investigators confirmed nearly every other horror but not that one.

What did the packers do when word leaked that Roosevelt's investigators Neill and Reynolds were coming to Chicago?

They cleaned the plants for three weeks, running three shifts a day, and the two men were still revolted; their report backed nearly everything in the novel except the rendering-tank tale.

Under the 1906 meat inspection compromise, who paid the estimated $30 million a year that the inspectors cost?

Taxpayers footed the bill, which is why Sinclair denounced the law his own book had forced through as an unearned gift to the big packers.

Which American novelist hailed The Jungle as 'the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery'?

Jack London, a fellow socialist, meant it as the highest praise: a novel that might move a nation to act as Stowe's had before the Civil War.

Sinclair admitted his fame came not from any concern for workers but because the public 'did not want to eat' what?

Tubercular beef, he said, was what frightened readers, "not because the public cared anything about the workers"; the book's politics barely registered.

To whom did Upton Sinclair dedicate The Jungle, the book he meant as an exposé of wage slavery rather than bad meat?

"To the Workingmen of America" reads the dedication, and the closing chapters turn into socialist speeches that most readers skipped straight past.

The Jungle went onto the bonfires of which country's 1933 book burnings, condemned for its author's socialist views?

Germany's Nazi book burnings of 1933 targeted it for Sinclair's socialism, ironic for a novel whose American readers had mostly ignored its politics.

Which German playwright moved Joan of Arc into the Chicago stockyards in a play inspired by The Jungle?

Bertolt Brecht wrote Saint Joan of the Stockyards between 1929 and 1931, fresh from The Threepenny Opera, with his heroine preaching to the packers.

Which British politician, later a wartime prime minister, wrote an admiring review of The Jungle when it appeared?

Winston Churchill praised the book in a review, one of the notices that carried the stockyards scandal well beyond America.

How many copies did The Jungle sell in its first six weeks, earning Sinclair what his biographers call a small fortune?

25,000 copies, and the early royalties went straight into a utopian colony in New Jersey that burned down within a year.

What does an old neighbour reveal about the contract on the house the Rudkus family buys in The Jungle?

Extra charges fall due monthly, expenses the smooth-talking agent never mentioned, and one missed payment means eviction, the fate of most buyers on that street.

Which job, the worst in the yards, does Jurgis Rudkus take in The Jungle after an injury costs him his old place?

The fertilizer mill, whose dust gets into everything, and it is there that the once-proud Jurgis begins drinking.

Which boss at Ona's workplace rapes her and coerces her in The Jungle, provoking the assault that jails Jurgis?

Phil Connor, who then tells the court he fired Ona for "impudence"; Jurgis's second attack on him, after the strike, is what ends his run as a political fixer.

How long does the judge jail Jurgis for attacking Ona's boss in The Jungle, on top of court fees he cannot pay?

Thirty days, plus three more for the unpaid fees; he then walks all day through slush to find the house resold and his family evicted.

Which cellmate, a professional thief, later pulls Jurgis into mugging and crime in The Jungle?

Jack Duane, met on his first jail stretch, and Jurgis's cut from one mugging is worth over twenty times a day's wages from his first job in the yards.

How does Ona die in The Jungle, while Jurgis scrambles through the boarding house for money to pay a doctor?

In premature childbirth, with a midwife bargained down because there is no doctor's fee; the baby is already dead, and Ona follows after one last look at Jurgis.

What kills Jurgis's small son Antanas in The Jungle, the blow that sends Jurgis out to tramp the countryside?

Drowning in street mud after he slips off a rotting boardwalk; the disabled toddler Kristoforas has already died of food poisoning that only his mother mourned.

What does the drunken son of a packing magnate hand Jurgis after a night in his mansion in The Jungle?

A hundred-dollar bill from Freddie Jones; a bartender cheats Jurgis while changing it and the brawl puts him back in jail.

Which Democratic boss of the stockyards makes Jurgis a vote fixer among new immigrants in The Jungle?

Mike Scully, whose machine once bought Jurgis's own vote when he was green; Jurgis repays the favour by herding fresh arrivals to the polls and scabbing in a strike.

Which cousin of Ona is courted by the fiddler Tamoszius in The Jungle, before the family's collapse?

Marija Berczynskas, proud and strong, is laid off in a seasonal cutback; she ends the novel in a brothel and tells Jurgis she cannot leave.

Which four-word shout, printed in capitals, closes The Jungle as an orator promises the workingmen victory?

"Chicago will be ours!" is shouted three times, the last in capitals, and it is the novel's very last line, a party rallying cry rather than any resolution for Jurgis.

At the wedding feast that opens The Jungle, what must each man do after dancing with the bride in the acziavimas?

Drop money into a hat held by Teta Elzbieta, a dollar or five according to his means; the custom is supposed to cover the feast, and this time it falls far short.

What must Jurgis's elderly father Dede Antanas give up to get hired in the pickle rooms in The Jungle?

A third of his wages, handed to a go-between who approached him in a corridor of the pickle rooms, the novel's first lesson that every job in the yards is for sale.

What does The Jungle say mouldy sausage sent back from Europe was dosed with before being made over for home sale?

Borax and glycerine, Sinclair wrote, then into the hoppers along with meat swept up off the floor; this chapter did more for food law than any speech in Congress.

What name did Chicago give the river arm on the yards' southern edge that took all their drainage, in The Jungle?

Bubbly Creek, so called because decomposing waste kept its surface fizzing; the city threatened to make the packers cover it until a friendly political boss stepped in.

In which city was Upton Sinclair born in 1878, the son of a liquor salesman whose drinking shadowed his childhood?

Baltimore, where his mother's family were prosperous while his father failed at one job after another, a split in fortunes the boy noticed early.

Which school did Upton Sinclair enter five days short of his 14th birthday, paying tuition by writing dime novels?

City College of New York, entered on September 15, 1892; he graduated in 1897 and went on to study law at Columbia, but was more interested in writing.

For which 1942 novel, set during Hitler's seizure of power, did Upton Sinclair win the Pulitzer Prize?

Dragon's Teeth, third of eleven Lanny Budd novels, took the 1943 prize; the series sat out of print for decades until ebook editions arrived in 2016.

Under which slogan did Upton Sinclair run for governor as a Democrat in 1934, drawing 879,000 votes but losing?

End Poverty in California, or EPIC, so alarmed business that Sinclair later described a "campaign of lying" funded with millions by the state's biggest businessmen and the film studios.

Upton Sinclair said a man can't grasp something 'when his ___ depends upon his not understanding it' — which word?

"Salary" completes it, and he used the line to explain why newspaper editors and publishers would not give his 1934 campaign a fair hearing.

Which 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film grew loosely from the opening chapters of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!?

There Will Be Blood took only the first 150 pages, Anderson said, and flipped the focus from the son to the oilman father modelled partly on Edward Doheny.

Which city barred Upton Sinclair's Oil! over a motel sex scene?

Boston banned the novel, a satire of the Teapot Dome oil scandal whose preacher Eli Watkins is modelled on the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

Which Soviet director's Mexican film did Sinclair and his wife produce after Charlie Chaplin recruited them?

Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! was bankrolled by the Sinclairs in 1930–32, an odd sideline for a novelist, arranged by Chaplin.

Time magazine, drawing on his wife's memoir, called Upton Sinclair 'a man with every gift except' what?

"Humor and silence" were the missing gifts, according to Mary Craig Sinclair's book Southern Belle, the memoir of what she called a crusader's wife.

Upton Sinclair's exposé The Brass Check attacked what, four years before journalists adopted their first code of ethics?

The newspapers, and the Associated Press wire with them; Sinclair called it "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written".

Which carmaker's rise does Upton Sinclair's 1937 novel The Flivver King chronicle?

Henry Ford, from his wage reform and company Sociological Department down to his antisemitic years as publisher of The Dearborn Independent.

Which 1914 event in the Colorado coalfields, which Sinclair laid at Rockefeller's door, drove him to write King Coal?

Sinclair made three trips to the Colorado coalfields in 1913-14 that led him to write King Coal, which confronts John D. Rockefeller Jr. over his role in the Ludlow Massacre.

Which poet's 'Chicago' gave the city the 'Hog Butcher for the World' tag that The Jungle's packers earned?

Carl Sandburg's line stuck to a district that at its peak covered nearly a square mile, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue.

What share of the vote did Upton Sinclair win in 1906, running for Congress in New Jersey on the Socialist ticket?

3% was the result of his first run, and later Socialist bids for the House and Senate fared little better; only as a Democrat did he ever draw a crowd.

What became of the first film version of The Jungle, shot in 1914 while the novel was still a sensation?

It is lost, like most silent films, and the story waited a century for a fresh adaptation: a 2019 graphic novel drawn by Kristina Gehrmann.