Upon arriving in his hotel in Chicago, Sinclair is said to have announced, “I am Upton Sinclair, and I have come to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement.” For seven weeks, he prowled the streets of Packingtown, the residential district next to the stockyards and packing plants. In 1904, the leading socialist weekly in the country, the Appeal to Reason, offered Sinclair $500 (equivalent to about $11,500 in 2008) to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry. McClure’s sales boomed, and other publications quickly commissioned exposés of their own. In January 1903, McClure’s carried Steffens’s installment on Minneapolis, launched a new series by Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, and featured an article on corruption in labor unions. McClure’s Magazine led the way, in October 1902, with a series by Lincoln Steffens that revealed corruption in city governments.

Around 1902, magazine publishers discovered that their sales soared when they featured exposés of political corruption, corporate misconduct, or other offenses. While at Columbia, he also became a convert to socialism.Īt the time, journalists had begun to play an important role in exposing wrongdoing. Though he came from a prominent family, his own parents had little money, and he paid for his university studies by writing dime novels and short stories. He had been born in Baltimore in 1878, but his family had moved to the Bronx in 1888. At the time he began working on the novel, he had completed his studies at Columbia University and was trying to develop a career as an author. The publication of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result.

The jungle book about meat