Showing results for "Upton Sinclair" in Political

The Jungle is a gritty exposé of the American meatpacking industry in the early 1900s, told through the eyes of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant chasing the American Dream in Chicago. Hoping for a better life, Jurgis and his family are quickly crushed by brutal labour conditions, poverty, corruption, and exploitation.

Based on the 1914 and 1915 Colorado coal strikes, King Coal describes the abhorrent conditions faced by workers in the western United States' coal mining industry during the 1910s. The story follows Hal Warner, a rich man looking to get a better view of the lives of commoners. It is a tale of struggle, threats, and violence, of hardened men and the advocacy for workers' rights. In this business, the road to unionization is a rocky one.

A Lithuanian family comes to America to seek a living. This book's ghastly and often brutal descriptions of work in the Chicago meat stockyards and the grim consequences of extreme poverty forced Congress to pass laws reforming work conditions and food safety standards in the United States. It also helped to stir up the Socialist movement in this country.

Prolific author and political activist Upton Sinclair throws the upheaval of the early twentieth century into sharp relief in "100%: The Story of a Patriot". In a matter of instants, a bomb blast transmutes Peter Gudge's entire existence into chaos, and in the resulting pandemonium, he's forced to reexamine all of his values and beliefs.

A young Lithuanian immigrant, full of hope, arrives in Chicago in 1904 to work in the stockyards. He and his family soon find themselves processed like the very cattle they slaughter, by the system they dreamed would save them.