In an age of inequality and exploitation, a 1906 novel that exposed hazardous working conditions and unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meat-packing plants at the turn of the 20th century still pops up in discussions about unjust labour.

A 2025 Current Affairs story about health problems for workers in poultry and pork processing plants reported on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests “we never left Upton Sinclair’s Jungle”.

A 2024 book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry explains how the Department of Labor’s discovery, in 2022, that “a contractor hired … to clean slaughterhouses employed over a hundred children in ‘hazardous occupations’ seems as if it came "straight out of ‘The Jungle.’”

What is it about Upton Sinclair’s 120-year-old novel that endures?

Read more: Radicals in the Democratic Party, from Upton Sinclair to Bernie Sanders

In 1904, Sinclair was commissioned by an editor of the socialist newspaper the Appeal to Reason to write a novel about wage slavery. Sinclair reveals in his autobiography that he chose the Chicago stockyards as its setting because of a recent failed strike led by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.

Beginning in October 1904, Sinclair lived for seven weeks among those he described as the “wage slaves of the Beef Trust” and went undercover in the plants by posing as an employee. He began writing on Christmas Day 1904, and three months later, the book was complete.

The Jungle appeared serially in the Appeal to Reason from February to November 1905 before being published as a full-length novel by Doubleday, Page........

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