author - "Upton Sinclair"
Description
The Jungle is one of the most famous muckraking novels in modern history. Set in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century, it tells the story of an immigrant Lithuanian family trying to make it in a new world both cruel and full of opportunity. Their struggles are in part a vehicle for Sinclair to shine a spotlight on the monstrous conditions of the meatpacking industry, to expose the brutal exploitation of immigrants and workers, and to espouse his more socialist worldview.
The novel is in part responsible for the passage of the revolutionary Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug act, and thus the establishment of the modern-day Food and Drug administration in the U.S. Its impact is in no small part due to the direct and powerful prose Sinclair employs: the horrors of commercial meat production are presented in full and glistening detail, and the tragedies and misfortunes of the Rudkus family are direct and relatable even today.
g by With trampling feet of horse and men: Empire on empire like the tide Flooded the world and ebbed again;
A thousand banners caught the sun, And cities smoked along the plain, And laden down with silk and gold And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
Kemp.
* * *
#The Priestly Lie#
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness--that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only
now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time. As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant, the three musicians follow her, laboriously and note by note, but averaging one note behind; thus they toil through stanza after stanza of a lovesick swain's lamentation:--
"Sudiev' kvietkeli, tu brangiausis; Sudiev' ir laime, man biednam, Matau--paskyre teip Aukszcziausis, Jog vargt ant svieto reik vienam!"
When the song is over, it is time for the speech, and old Dede Antanas rises to his feet. Grandfather Anthony, Jurgis' father, is not more than sixty years of age, but you would think that he was eighty. He has been only six months in America, and the change has not done him good. In his manhood he worked in a cotton mill, but then a coughing fell upon him, and he had to leave; out in the country the trouble disappeared, but he has been wo
Description
The Jungle is one of the most famous muckraking novels in modern history. Set in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century, it tells the story of an immigrant Lithuanian family trying to make it in a new world both cruel and full of opportunity. Their struggles are in part a vehicle for Sinclair to shine a spotlight on the monstrous conditions of the meatpacking industry, to expose the brutal exploitation of immigrants and workers, and to espouse his more socialist worldview.
The novel is in part responsible for the passage of the revolutionary Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug act, and thus the establishment of the modern-day Food and Drug administration in the U.S. Its impact is in no small part due to the direct and powerful prose Sinclair employs: the horrors of commercial meat production are presented in full and glistening detail, and the tragedies and misfortunes of the Rudkus family are direct and relatable even today.
g by With trampling feet of horse and men: Empire on empire like the tide Flooded the world and ebbed again;
A thousand banners caught the sun, And cities smoked along the plain, And laden down with silk and gold And heaped up pillage groaned the wain.
Kemp.
* * *
#The Priestly Lie#
When the first savage saw his hut destroyed by a bolt of lightning, he fell down upon his face in terror. He had no conception of natural forces, of laws of electricity; he saw this event as the act of an individual intelligence. To-day we read about fairies and demons, dryads and fauns and satyrs, Wotan and Thor and Vulcan, Freie and Flora and Ceres, and we think of all these as pretty fancies, play-products of the mind; losing sight of the fact that they were originally meant with entire seriousness--that not merely did ancient man believe in them, but was forced to believe in them, because the mind must have an explanation of things that happen, and an individual intelligence was the only
now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time. As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant, the three musicians follow her, laboriously and note by note, but averaging one note behind; thus they toil through stanza after stanza of a lovesick swain's lamentation:--
"Sudiev' kvietkeli, tu brangiausis; Sudiev' ir laime, man biednam, Matau--paskyre teip Aukszcziausis, Jog vargt ant svieto reik vienam!"
When the song is over, it is time for the speech, and old Dede Antanas rises to his feet. Grandfather Anthony, Jurgis' father, is not more than sixty years of age, but you would think that he was eighty. He has been only six months in America, and the change has not done him good. In his manhood he worked in a cotton mill, but then a coughing fell upon him, and he had to leave; out in the country the trouble disappeared, but he has been wo