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 were enough: he put on overalls and posed as a worker to get inside the plants, with a socialist paper covering his costs.

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

Appeal to Reason advanced Sinclair $500 to go to Chicago and ran his story in instalments through 1905, so its subscribers read the novel a year before any publisher would risk it as a book.

Which publisher finally issued The Jungle as a book in 1906, after a string of houses 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 rebuke, but the name came to stand for courageous exposure of wrongdoing.

Which law did Theodore Roosevelt sign on the same day in 1906 as the federal meat inspection law?

The Pure Food and Drug Act put enforcement with the USDA's Bureau of Chemistry, forerunner of the Food and Drug Administration, 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?

"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.

What becomes of young Stanislovas in The Jungle after he falls asleep drunk at work?

Eaten by rats: the boy carried beer for the men at an oil factory, drank too much of it and was locked in overnight, and by morning there was almost nothing left to find.

What does The Jungle call the crowded immigrant district behind the Chicago stockyards?

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.

Roosevelt's investigators watched a hog carcass slide into what at a Chicago plant, then go back on the line unwashed?

A workers' privy: the commissioners saw the carcass hauled out and hung with the others uncleaned, and their report backed nearly everything in the novel except the men lost in the vats.

Under the 1906 meat inspection compromise, who ended up paying for the inspections?

Taxpayers footed the bill, a concession the packers won in the compromise, and Sinclair himself disliked the law that his own book had forced through.

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?

"To the Workingmen of America" reads the dedication, yet the laws the novel inspired dealt with the meat, not with the men who packed it.

The Jungle went onto the bonfires of which country's 1930s 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 playwright moved Joan of Arc into the Chicago stockyards in a play that drew on 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, though he rejected its conclusion that socialism was the cure.

What did Upton Sinclair found in New Jersey with his early royalties from The Jungle?

A utopian colony, Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, opened in October 1906; the building burned down the following March and the experiment ended with it.

What does an old neighbour reveal about the Rudkus family's house contract 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.

On which night does Jurgis, jailed for attacking Ona's boss in The Jungle, hear the city's bells and break down?

Christmas Eve catches him in a cell, remembering the lit shop windows he and Ona showed the children a year before; the judge then gives him thirty days, long enough for the family to lose the house.

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?

Drop money into a hat held by Teta Elzbieta, a dollar or five as each can afford; this dance, the acziavimas, is supposed to pay for 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, and then it was dumped into the hoppers with meat that had lain on the floor in the dirt and sawdust, and made over for sale at home.

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 own parents were poor while his mother's relatives were rich; he later said that living between the two extremes made him a socialist.

Which school did Upton Sinclair enter in his early teens?

City College of New York: he paid for his own studies there by churning out jokes, dime novels and adventure stories for the pulp magazines.

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

Dragon's Teeth follows Lanny Budd as he uses his trade in paintings as cover to try to get a Jewish friend out of a Nazi concentration camp.

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 film studios filled cinemas with faked interviews against him; Sinclair later called it a "campaign of lying" paid for with millions of dollars.

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

"Salary" completes it; the line comes from his 1935 book on how he lost the governor's race, and Al Gore revived it decades later in An Inconvenient Truth.

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 it, so Sinclair's publisher printed a "fig-leaf edition" with the offending pages blacked out, while other Bostonians simply took the train to New York to buy the book.

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

Sergei Eisenstein never finished ¡Qué viva México!: after more than a year of shooting, the Sinclairs' film trust ran out of money and patience and shut the production down.

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

"Humor and silence" were the gifts Time found missing in 1957, reviewing Mary Craig Sinclair's memoir Southern Belle, which it read as the story of life with an admirable, preposterous man.

What did Upton Sinclair attack in his 1919 exposé The Brass Check?

The newspapers, and the Associated Press wire with them; Sinclair called it "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written", and four years later editors adopted their first code of ethics.

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?

The Ludlow Massacre drove Sinclair to picket Rockefeller's New York offices in a black armband, and then to turn the Colorado coal strike into the novel King Coal.

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

Carl Sandburg's 1914 poem made a boast of it, calling Chicago proud to be Hog Butcher, eight years after The Jungle had made the same trade a national scandal.

Upton Sinclair was arrested at a 1923 strike rally for reading what aloud?

The Bill of Rights: police seized him at a San Pedro dockers' rally before he was through the First Amendment, and the protest meetings that followed gave rise to the ACLU's Southern California branch.

What became of the first film version of The Jungle, made in the 1910s?

It is lost, like most films of its day; the surviving credits list Sinclair himself among the cast.