1. Most of the first version of The Jungle was published serially in Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas) between 02 25 and November 4, 1905Google Scholar. The full text of this version appeared more or less simultaneously in three segments in a quarterly, also published in Girard, called One Hoss Philosophy (nos. 33–35, April, July, and October 1905). In February 1906 Doubleday, Page (New York) brought out a book version based on the One Hoss Philosophy text, but with significant deletions. Unless otherwise noted, quotations from The Jungle and references to its chapter divisions in this essay are from the Doubleday, Page version, first edition. Page references appear in parentheses in the body of the text.

2. The term “proletarian literature” may have been introduced into American literary discourse when Sinclair claimed pride of place for The Jungle. In an important article written while the novel was still a scandalous success, Sinclair was pleased to announce that “its publication marks the beginning of a proletarian literature in America.…” “What Life Means to Me,” Cosmopolitan, 41 (10 1906), 591–95Google Scholar. I have come across no earlier use of the term.

3. Sinclair describes his career as a pulp writer in The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt Brace, and World, 1962), pp. 48–52Google Scholar, as does Harris, Leon, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1975), pp. 68–90Google Scholar. Gottesman, Ronald, “Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Bibliographical Catalogue 1894—1932,” diss. Indiana Univ., 1964Google Scholar, lists the many boys' serial stories that have been identified as Sinclair's early work (I refer to Gottesman's dissertation, rather than to his later Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist [Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1973], because the former includes substantial commentary and analysis. My discussion of the composition and publication of The Jungle is much in debt to the work of Gottesman and Harris). Also see Gottesman, , “The Upton Sinclair Dime Novels,” Dime Novel Round-up, 33 (03 15, 1964), 20–23.Google Scholar

4. Sinclair, Upton, “Is ‘The Jungle’ True?,” Independent, 40 (05 17, 1906), 1129–33.Google Scholar

5. Sinclair, , “Our Bourgeois Literature—The Reason and the Remedy,” Coltier's, 34 (10 8, 1904), 22–25Google Scholar. This article is a belated reply to novelist Atherton, Gertrude's much discussed piece, “Why is American Literature Bourgeois?” North American Review, 178 (05 1904), 771–81Google Scholar. Sinclair took his reply to Collier's after the North American turned it down. See Autobiography, p. 107.Google Scholar

6. Sinclair referred to Hegan, Alice Caldwell's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (New York, 1902)Google Scholar, an extremely popular tale of cheerful penury.

7. A good example of an early radical who stressed the anti-bourgeois virtues of the frank and free life supposedly found in the slums may be found in the article by Limedorfer, Eugene called “Gorky and His Philosophy,” The Comrade, 1 (11 1901), 43–44.Google Scholar

8. Sinclair, , Autobiography, p. 9.Google Scholar

9. Sinclair, , “My Cause,” Independent, 55 (05 14, 1903), 1121–26.Google Scholar

10. Sinclair, , Autobiography, p. 112Google Scholar. Leon Harris writes persuasively about the facts and nature of Sinclair's period of poverty during the years just before the composition of The Jungle, and about the intensity of his psychological response to his financial difficulties (Upton Sinclair, pp. 44–56).Google Scholar

11. Sinclair, , The Journal of Arthur Sterling (New York, 1903), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

12. Sinclair, , Mammonart (Pasadena, Calif: published by the author, 1925), pp. 238–40.Google Scholar

13. A passage from Dell, Floyd's second novel, The Briary-Bush (New York: The Macaulay Co., 1921)Google Scholar deserves to be recalled as a gloss upon Sinclair's literary relation to the world of the stockyards. Dell was to become Sinclair, 's first biographer (Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest [Long Beach, Calif.: Upton Sinclair, 1927])Google Scholar, and was similarly a young poet and Socialist when he arrived in Chicago not long after The Jungle was published, but his response to the stockyards was surprisingly different from Sinclair's. Felix Fay in the fiction is very much Dell himself, who went to visit the stockyards expecting to find in their “gruesome realities” an antidote to his “romanticism”:

He was one of a long queue of visitors who were led from one building to another and lectured at and shown the sights. After an hour he had seen nothing sufficiently gruesome to be exciting, and he was becoming annoyed with his fellow-visitors. They stared at the workers with a kind of dull unimaginative pity. Felix resented those stares. He felt that he understood these workers; had he not been one of them himself in factory days at Port Royal! There was something indecent in this gaping and pointing. He dropped out of line and went away.

He had missed the great scene, still to come—the cattle-killing. But he reflected that he was a butcher's son. This was merely a slaughterhouse on a grand scale. He had nothing new to learn from the stockyards. … [p. 29; the final ellipsis is Dell's punctuation.]

14. See Sinclair, , Autobiography, pp. 108–10Google Scholar, for an account of the background to the writing of The Jungle; also see Dell, , Upton SinclairGoogle Scholar. Sinclair was already adept at writing novels on subjects he knew nothing about. In his Autobiography, pp. 49–50Google Scholar, Sinclair makes light of the poverty of information on which he constructed his early pulp fiction about student life at Annapolis and West Point. He also boasts about the intensive research (a thousand books read or “consulted”) which went into his 1904 Civil War novel, Manassas (Autobiography, p. 95)Google Scholar. Research was, to be sure, a fairly common practice among “realists”; Stephen Crane's success with The Red Badge of Courage is only the best-known example.

15. Sinclair, , “Is ‘The Jungle’ True?,” p. 1129.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 1130.

18. Sinclair, , Autobiography, p. 110.Google Scholar

19. Sinclair, , “Is ‘The Jungle’ True?,” p. 1132.Google Scholar

20. Sinclair, , “Regarding The Jungle,” Appeal to Reason, 02 11, 1905Google Scholar. The punctuation in quotations from this article is Sinclair's own.

21. Sinclair, , “Comrades of the Appeal,” Appeal to Reason, 03 4, 1905.Google Scholar

22. Sinclair, , “Is ‘The Jungle’ True?,” p. 1130.Google Scholar

23. Harris, , Upton Sinclair, p. 75.Google Scholar

24. Sinclair, to Brett, George, 06 10, 1905Google Scholar, New York Public Library Manuscript Collection.

25. Gottesman, , “Catalogue,” pp. 93–95Google Scholar, suggests the idea that Sinclair's organizing of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was crucial to his completion of The Jungle, and Harris, , Upton Sinclair, pp. 75–76Google Scholar, follows him, as I have here. I do not believe, however, that the evidence is conclusive. Sinclair's letter to Brett, cited in note 27 below, in which he acknowledged the weaknesses of “the second half of the novel and proposed rewriting it, was written the day after the official founding of the ISC on September 12, 1905. Sinclair continued to devote himself to organizational work till November, by which time the novel was complete, the last third having appeared in the October issue of One Hoss Philosophy.

26. Sinclair, , American Outpost (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932), p. 161.Google Scholar

27. Sinclair, to Brett, , 09 13, 1905Google Scholar, New York Public Library Manuscript Collection.

28. Harris, , Upton Sinclair, p. 118.Google Scholar

29. Sinclair, , American Outpost, p. 161.Google Scholar

30. See note 1, above.

31. London, Jack, Appeal to Reason, 11 18, 1905.Google Scholar

32. Rideout, Walter discusses the prevalence of the “conversion motif” in radical fiction in The Radical Novel in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956).Google Scholar

33. Page references to Sinclair, 's Industrial Republic (New York, 1907)Google Scholar are indicated in parentheses in the text with the initials “IR” followed by page numbers.

34. Gottesman discusses the making of a film of The Jungle, “Catalogue,” p. 103Google Scholar; likewise Harris, , Upton Sinclair, p. 150Google Scholar. No copy of this film has survived. The anonymous orator who converts Jurgis to socialism is often said to be modeled on Eugene Debs, but nothing could throw into sharper relief the character of Sinclair's orator's address than comparison with the public language of Debs, who was characteristically concrete and polemical rather than abstract and sentimental. See most appropriately his article, “What's the Matter with Chicago?,” Chicago Socialist, 25 (10 1902)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs, ed., Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948).Google Scholar

35. Sinclair's proposal of expropriation indicates that he was not to the extreme right of the Socialist party. Victor Berger, for instance, argued that the Civil War could have been prevented by compensating slave-holders for their human property and, therefore, as quoted by Weinstein, James: “‘We ought to learn from history,’ Berger concluded. ‘We will offer compensation’ because ‘it seems just to present-day thought and will prove the easiest, cheapest way in the end,’” The Decline of Socialism in America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), p. 8.Google Scholar

36. Sinclair, , Jimmie Higgins (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919).Google Scholar

37. Sinclair's account of his conversion to socialism is rather low key (see Autobiography, p. 101)Google Scholar, but Harris offers evidence of his spiritual turmoil in this period, hardly more than a year before he began the Jungle project (Upton Sinclair, pp. 56–67).Google Scholar

38. The “editor of a big Eastern magazine” may have been Norman Hapgood of Collier's.

39. For a detailed discussion of London's attitude toward women and Sinclair's attitude toward London's attitude toward women, see Folsom, Michael Brewster, “Literary Radicalism and Genteel Tradition: A Study of the Principal Literary Works of the American Socialist Movement Before 1912,” diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1972.Google Scholar

40. Sinclair, , Autobiography, p. 37.Google Scholar

41. One Hoss Philosophy, 35 (10 1905), 242.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., p. 248.

43. Mayo, Margaret and Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle: A Play in Four Acts and Five Scenes (Selwyn and Co., Play Brokers, 1906)Google Scholar, unpublished manuscript in the Upton Sinclair collection at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana. Gottesman's “Catalogue” gives an outline of the story of the dramatization of The Jungle, pp. 101–103Google Scholar. Harris, , Upton Sinclair, p. 96Google Scholar, discusses the relations between Sinclair and Mayo.