The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Jungle
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Chapter I: a wedding party, a saloon, and a coachman’s ancestors
It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija’s broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortege at each side street for half a mile.
This was unfortunate, for already there was a throng before the door. The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull “broom, broom” of a cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics. Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, “Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!” in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music.
Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, “Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!” in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music.
Download Full EPUB1906
~149,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 8.3 hours
Standalone
Packingtown and the stockyards, Chicago: Ashland Avenue, Halsted Street, and the boarding houses back of the yards
Chapters I-XXXI
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0.59 MB (EPUB) · 0.76 MB (AZW3) · 0.63 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #140
The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian farm hand who comes to Chicago with his bride Ona, her stepmother and her six children, and takes the first job offered at Brown’s killing beds. Sinclair follows the household through Packingtown — the hog line, the canning rooms, the fertilizer mill — as the wage falls, the debts compound, and the house they buy on installments turns out to be rented. Around them the yards run as one great firm, the Beef Trust, and the city as a machine for selling votes. The novel was written to make socialists, and its last third follows Jurgis from the yards to a party meeting.
The book began as an assignment: in 1904 the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason sent Sinclair to Packingtown for seven weeks and serialized the result through 1905. Doubleday, Page published it in February 1906, and it made its author famous for a chapter about spoiled meat rather than for its argument — “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he said later, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” This page follows the 1906 text. The novel is described on The Jungle. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #140.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: Summary, Characters & Themes
The Jungle is a summary and analysis of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel about the Chicago stockyards, and of the household it follows from a wedding in a Packingtown saloon to the political meetings of 1904. Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite marry in the back room of a saloon, collect a purse that does not cover the hall, and start married life owing a hundred dollars. Jurgis shovels guts at Brown’s for seventeen and a half cents an hour; Ona paints cans, then works in the canning rooms; Teta Elzbieta takes in boarders; the two middle boys sell papers. Each chapter tightens the same screw: less work, lower pay, a new mouth to feed, a new bill.
The family is large enough to be a small economy, and Sinclair keeps its accounts in front of the reader. Jurgis is the engine of it, a man who believes that if he works harder the company will notice; Ona is the one who signs for the house and then has to keep the payments; Marija Berczynskas, Ona’s cousin, paints cans, courts the violinist Tamoszius, and later keeps the household alive out of her own earnings; Elzbieta, Ona’s stepmother, nurses babies, borrows from neighbors, and buries a child. Around them stand the boss Phil Connor, the Democratic boss Mike Scully, the cracksman Jack Duane and, at the end, the socialist Ostrinski.
The novel has no chapter titles, only numbers, and it moves in three long movements: arrival and the first year of work, the dismantling of the household, and Jurgis’s education in the city’s other economy. Sinclair had read Zola and built the book out of trades and documents: the killing bed, the lard machine, the tankage room, the time check, the contract for a house. The sequence on adulterated meat is one chapter among many, and it works because the reader has already stood all day at the killing floor.
Sinclair wrote the book for the Appeal to Reason, which serialized it in 1905; Doubleday, Page issued it in February 1906, and the uproar helped carry the meat inspection bill through Congress that June. Theodore Roosevelt disliked the socialism and still had the packing houses investigated. Sinclair spent the rest of his career complaining that the country had read the packing house chapters and skipped the argument, which is why the last hundred pages are a lecture as much as a story.
This edition follows the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1906 text, with its Lithuanian phrases, its wage figures and its Chicago street names left as Sinclair wrote them. Readers who want the city novel without the socialism should try Sister Carrie; those who want the same years from the drawing room side should read The House of Mirth. A third companion, The Awakening, is a short 1899 novel about a woman who refuses the role her family has bought for her. The author’s life is set out on Upton Sinclair, and the source text is at Project Gutenberg #140.
Historical Context
Packingtown in 1904 was the largest slaughtering and meat packing district in the world, a square mile of pens and rails southwest of the Chicago stockyards, with twenty five thousand gates and two hundred and fifty miles of track inside the fences. The work was seasonal, the labor immigrant, and the neighborhoods back of the yards had been laid out on made ground, with unpaved streets several feet below the level of the houses and standing water in the hollows. Sinclair’s family arrives in this district, not in the fashionable city of the World’s Fair a few miles north.
The politics of the yards mattered to Sinclair as much as the meat. Naturalization papers were handed out by party workers, elections were watched by company men, and a Democratic boss like Mike Scully could fix a bail hearing, find a man a place during a strike, or buy a vote three times over. Sinclair calls the packers one great firm, the Beef Trust, and shows the unions bargaining for the skilled men while the unskilled were cut from eighteen and a half cents an hour to sixteen and a half. The strike of 1904, which he reports as the Beef Strike, is his proof that the machine could wait longer than the men.
The novel belongs to the muckraking years, when magazines and socialist weeklies sent writers to count what the industrial city did to the people who fed it. Sinclair spent seven weeks in Packingtown in 1904, talked to workers, doctors and settlement house residents, and built scenes from what he was told; the result is closer to reportage with a plot than to naturalism. Its limits are visible: the Lithuanians speak a stage dialect, the socialist speeches run long, and the solution arrives as a lecture. Its accuracy about wages, housing and speed-up is not in doubt, and the meat inspection law followed the book within months, in June 1906.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Jurgis Rudkus: Jurgis Rudkus is the strongest man in his family and the last to understand what the yards are doing to him. He arrives believing that work is a fair exchange, takes the worst job at Brown’s, learns to shovel guts and to keep pace with the line, and is proud of the seventeen and a half cents an hour he earns. His education is the novel’s real subject: a beating, a jail cell, a blacklist and a winter of tramping teach him what the union and the party had been saying. By the end he is a convert, and the book shows what the conversion cost.
- Ona Lukoszaite: Ona is Jurgis’s wife, a slight girl who is proud of a white muslin dress and frightened of the monthly payment. She keeps the household’s accounts in her head, goes back to the canning rooms after an illness, and is kept at Brown’s by Phil Connor, the boss of the loading gang, on terms she cannot refuse; when she finally tells Jurgis, the confession does more damage than the seduction did. Her death in childbirth, in a garret under a leaking roof, is where the novel stops being about a family and becomes about a system.
- Marija Berczynskas: Marija is Ona’s cousin, a big voiced woman who runs the wedding, scolds the coachman in Lithuanian and Polish, and takes a job painting cans at two dollars a day. She is the household’s best earner and its most generous lender, and when her bank fails she draws her savings in silver dollars and carries them home in a handkerchief. Her courtship with the frail violinist Tamoszius is the book’s one tender subplot; her later life in a brothel, dosed with morphine and paying Elzbieta fifteen dollars a week, is its coldest piece of accounting.
- Teta Elzbieta: Teta Elzbieta Lukoszaite is Ona’s stepmother and the household’s memory: she keeps the children, borrows from neighbors, and buries the crippled boy Kristoforas with money begged for white plumes. She is the one who insists on the wedding feast and the one who signs for the house, and she survives every disaster in the book, which is its own kind of indictment. Sinclair gives her no rhetoric and no conversion; she outlasts the men, and when Jurgis comes back with news of the party she is the first to listen.
Core Literary Themes
- Men as parts of the machine: Sinclair’s first theme is the conversion of men into parts. The killing floor is organized so that each worker makes one cut as the carcass passes, the pace is set by machinery, and the packers hire extra hands every week so that strikers can be replaced. Jurgis learns “speeding up the gang” from older men and from pacemakers paid to set a faster rate; when he is injured the company finds another man before he reaches the door. The phrase about worn out parts of the packing machine is not a figure inside the book: it is how the blacklist works.
- Debt as a form of ownership: The second theme is debt. The house is sold for fifteen hundred dollars with three hundred down and twelve dollars a month, and the paper the agent calls a deed is a lease with a forfeiture clause; the furniture is bought on installments at a rate that turns seventy five dollars into a debt twice that size. Every raise is met by a new payment and every illness by a loan from Marija’s bank account. Sinclair’s point is structural: the family is never solvent enough to refuse a bad job, and the contract ensures that the landlord, the store and the saloon are paid before the children.
- Law, party and the fixer: The third theme is the machinery of law and party. Jurgis is arrested for beating the man who ruined his wife, tried by a judge who owes his seat to Scully, and left in jail because no one will post three hundred dollars; the same court later fines the girls in a brothel from a wad of bills kept in the madame’s stocking. Elections in Packingtown are a market: a watchman hands out two dollar bills and shows the men how to mark the ballot, and a boss can find a scab a place during a strike. Sinclair’s target is not cruelty but the ordinary corruption that makes cruelty legal.
- One great firm, and the socialist answer: The fourth theme is the trust itself. Sinclair insists that the packers are not competitors but one firm, and that the Beef Trust sets wages, prices, inspection and politics together; the strike fails because the trust can outlast the men, and the meat scandal is possible because the same firm owns the inspectors. Against this he sets the socialist argument, put at the end into the mouths of Ostrinski, Hinds and Schliemann: that the workers already run the industry, that the vote can be organized, and that a society which treats labor as a commodity will keep producing ruined families.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Jungle?
This edition is built from the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1906 Doubleday, Page text, which is the version most American readers have used for a century. Nothing has been cut and nothing modernized: the wage figures, the Lithuanian and Polish phrases, the street names and the long socialist speeches are as Sinclair published them. The chapter summaries on this page follow the thirty one chapters in order, so a reader who wants to check a scene can find the chapter before downloading. Page numbers from the 1906 printing will not match, because the transcription has no fixed pagination, but chapter numbers and quotations will.
The page also carries a character list, a note on the historical Packingtown, and eight questions about the book’s publication and reception, because The Jungle is usually read in fragments: the meat chapter in a history class, the wedding in an anthology. Reading it whole makes the structure visible, and the summaries are written to help with that rather than to replace the novel. The book was read in 1906 both as a scandal and as a warning, and the two readings have never quite separated; reading it in one piece is the quickest way to see why both were possible.
The download is a single DRM free file in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, with a cover, a working table of contents and the chapter numbers as Sinclair left them. It opens on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and every other reader, and it needs no account, no sample chapter and no lock on the file. Each file was opened on a Kindle and on a Kobo before upload, and the text reflows when the font size changes; there are no footnotes to lose, because the novel has none, and the table of contents jumps straight to any of the thirty one chapters.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #140 is the source text used for this edition. It keeps Sinclair’s own punctuation, his Lithuanian and Polish phrases, his wage figures and his Chicago street names, so quotations and page references from other readers will match this file. Page numbers from the 1906 printing will not match, but the chapter divisions will.
- Complete 31-chapter text No abridgement, no modernized spelling, no omitted speeches and no softened ending: the novel as Doubleday, Page published it in February 1906, including the chapters most anthologies leave out. The chapter numbers are Sinclair’s own; the book never gave them titles, and the summaries above keep his numbering.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the book opens with its cover and table of contents on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, PocketBook and every other reader that matters, without conversion software or a store account. Each file is checked before it is uploaded. The three formats carry the same text and the same cover.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States and free to copy, with no account, no sample chapter, no newsletter signup and no lock on the file; check your own country’s copyright term before you redistribute it. The novel was published in 1906, so the US text is open.
- The Awakening — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Sister Carrie — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Bartleby the Scrivener — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Jungle has thirty one chapters, no chapter titles and about 149,000 words. It falls into three movements: arrival and the first year of work, the dismantling of the household, and Jurgis’s education in the city. These twelve summaries follow the chapters in order.
- Chapters I-II: The novel opens at a Lithuanian wedding in the back room of a Packingtown saloon. Marija Berczynskas, the bride’s cousin, races the carriage down Ashland Avenue and shouts her opinion of the coachman first in Lithuanian and then in Polish; inside, a cello saws “broom, broom” and Marija clears a path through the crowd with her shoulders. The guests dance, old Dede Antanas makes the speech, and the collection is counted: the veselija has cost more than the family can pay, and the couple begin married life in debt. Chapter II steps back to tell how the party of twelve left Lithuania, was cheated by agents in New York, and found its way to the yards.
- Chapters III-IV: Jokubas Szedvilas takes the men to a Durham special policeman, and within a morning Jurgis is hired at Brown’s. He waits two hours at the wrong door, answers “No; Lit-uanian” to the question about English, and is told to shovel guts for seventeen and a half cents an hour; his first day’s pay is a dollar and a half. The tour of the yards follows: the hog wheel, the boiling vat, the line of a hundred men each making one cut, and the guide’s joke that they use everything about the hog except the squeal. That evening an agent shows the family a house for fifteen hundred dollars, and the paper turns out to be a lease.
- Chapters V-VII: The house is furnished on installments — seventy five dollars for “feather your nest” — and the first payment falls due before the first full week of work. Jurgis learns the pace of the killing floor, the men who set it, and the union that cannot stop it; Ona and Jurgis postpone the church wedding until Elzbieta insists, and the November feast costs them another hundred dollars. Grandmother Majauszkiene, who has lived in the neighborhood longer than anyone, tells them the history of the house: four families have tried to pay for it, and all four lost it, because the contract is written so that one missed month ends the sale.
- Chapters VIII-X: Winter shuts the yards down to half time, and men stand outside the gates in twenty below zero for the chance of a day’s work. Jurgis joins the butcher helpers’ union, which he understands as a miniature republic, and goes to night school to learn English; on election day a watchman hands each man two dollars and shows him how to mark the ballot, and Jonas votes three times. Then the packers cut the unskilled rate, Ona’s wages fall, Marija is laid off for four weeks, and the family discovers that the party boss Mike Scully owns the dump, the brick factory and the ice house, and that none of it is for them.
- Chapters XI-XIII: The packers hire new hands every week, not because they need them but because they are training strike breakers; the hog line is timed by clockwork, and the canning girls have their wages cut by a third in two years. There is no strike to join, only a union that keeps asking and a company that answers by hiring more men than it needs; when a bank fails, Marija stands in line all day to draw her savings in silver dollars, carries them home in a handkerchief and sews them into her clothes. Jurgis twists a tendon and spends three weeks in bed; Vilimas and Nikalojus, eleven and ten, are sent out to sell papers; and the crippled child Kristoforas dies after eating a smoked sausage, with a funeral paid for by begging neighbors.
- Chapters XIV-XV: This is the novel’s documentary core: sour meat rubbed with soda, hams pumped with pickle and sold at thirty per cent over weight, spoiled cuts boned and plugged with a white hot iron, sausage made from rats and floor sweepings, and men washing their hands in the same water. Sinclair then turns to the women’s hours: during the holiday rush Ona works from seven in the morning until ten or eleven at night with no time to eat. One snowy night she does not come home, and Jurgis learns from Jadvyga that she was not there. Ona’s confession names Phil Connor, the boss of the loading gang, and Jurgis goes to find him.
- Chapters XVI-XVII: Jurgis is picked up by a patrol wagon, charged with assault and battery, and brought before a magistrate everyone calls the Growler, a former butcher boy who owes his place to Scully. Connor is under a doctor’s care, the bond is three hundred dollars, and no one in Packingtown will sign it, because the savings have gone for rent and doctors and the men who might help are waiting to be paid. Jurgis spends Christmas in a cell, where a well dressed cracksman named Jack Duane teaches him the economics of crime, and where the other prisoners nickname him the stinker because he still smells of the fertilizer mill.
- Chapters XVIII-XIX: Jurgis comes out with a shaved head, no overcoat and a dollar and a half of court costs worked off, and walks twenty miles through sleet to a house that an Irish family has already bought. The family has moved back to Aniele’s, where Ona is in labor in a garret; the midwife Madame Haupt, whose sign swings over a saloon, haggles from twenty five dollars down to five, then to a dollar and a quarter on credit, and climbs the ladder to a room she says is no place to bear a child. The child is born, the mother is not saved, and the last money in the house goes for a mass; the body is taken to the potter’s field.
- Chapters XX-XXII: The packers keep a secret list in every office, and Jurgis is on it: no yard will hire him, and the family breaks up, Elzbieta keeping the children, Jurgis sleeping in station houses and taking fifteen cents a day from the boys. A settlement worker climbs the ladder with a food basket and a letter to the steel works at South Chicago, which comes to nothing; the harvester works shut without notice and turn thousands into the snow. Then Marija comes to tell him that little Antanas has drowned in the mud of a flooded yard, and Jurgis walks out of the city, bathes in a stream, and refuses a farmer’s offer of a dollar a day.
- Chapters XXIII-XXIV: Jurgis works six and a half weeks digging telephone tunnels at fifteen cents an hour, claiming Kansas City and no references, a fall of earth breaks his arm, and he spends Christmas in a hospital where the doctors use him for experiments and the food is thin. He begs through the winter, sleeps in doorways, and is taken home one night by a drunken young swell in a silk hat who feeds him and presses a hundred dollar bill into his hand before passing out on the library sofa.
- Chapters XXV-XXVII: At a saloon the bartender takes the hundred dollar bill, punches up five cents and counts out two dimes, a quarter and fifty cents, then swears he was never given the bill; Jurgis throws the glass, is clubbed, and goes to the Bridewell for the second time. He works through the election, keeps a job at eleven dollars a week and nearly three hundred in the bank, and then the packers cut the unskilled rate to sixteen and a half cents and fifty thousand men walk out. Jurgis asks Scully for work during the strike and takes a scab’s place, and when the strike collapses he meets Connor in a doorway and beats him a second time. Remanded in five hundred dollars’ bail, unable to make it, he is a wanted man again, and this section ends among soup kitchen lines and two cent beer dives.
- Chapters XXVIII-XXXI: A raid on a brothel brings Jurgis before the same court, where he says he is looking for his sister and the judge fines each girl five dollars from the madame’s stocking; outside, Marija tells him she is on morphine, earns two dollars and fifty cents a customer, and gives Elzbieta fifteen dollars a week. Jurgis follows a brass band into a socialist meeting, hears the Marseillaise and a speech that seems aimed at him, and is taken in hand by a lame Polish comrade named Ostrinski. Hinds’s Hotel gives him a porter’s job at thirty dollars a month and a boss who calls him Comrade; Fisher’s dinner and Schliemann’s lecture follow, and the book ends in a party hall on election night, counting votes.
The Jungle: Frequently Asked Questions
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Did Upton Sinclair work in the stockyards himself?
Why did readers remember the meat and not the socialism?
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Part of: Classic Books by Length and Reading Time · Authors
