The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Annotated Edition

The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair's failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before the novel's publication by journalists and social critics. For years before Sinclair began his work, these groups of writers and journalists had documented the abuses of the industry and the plight of immigrant workers who suffered under terrible working conditions.