The Jungle

Lore & Background

The novel portrays working-class poverty, immigrant struggle, lack of social support or welfare, harsh living and dangerous working conditions, generating hopelessness, cynicism, and cruelty among the powerless. These elements are contrasted with the deeply rooted corruption of people in power. A review by Sinclair's contemporary, writer Jack London, compared The Jungle to America's most famous novel written to expose a cruel system, by calling it 'the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery.'

In Their Own Story

The humidity hit first—a wall of it, thick enough to taste. Duke wiped the condensation off his sunglasses and stepped over a root the width of a car axle. Somewhere ahead, a Nuke drone buzzed through a curtain of hanging moss, its red eye blinking like a firefly gone wrong. He racked his shotgun. The water was up to his shins, warm and black, and the canopy above turned the afternoon sun into a green-gold smudge. A branch snapped. Then another. Something big was moving through the undergrowth, and the mud was shaking. Duke grinned, spat into the river, and raised the weapon. "Alright, you ugly bastards," he muttered. "Let's see what the jungle's hiding."

Reader's Guide

The source article does not describe any gameplay or level guide.

Did You Know?

• In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information in the meat packing district of the Union Stock Yards in Chicago for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, which published his novel in serial form in 1905.
• In 1906, the novel was published in book format by Doubleday.
• While Sinclair's goal in describing the meat industry and its working conditions was to advance socialism, the novel's most immediate impact was to provoke public outcry over passages exposing health issues and unsanitar