The Jungle

I recently finished "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, an interesting coincidence with the current anti-Wall Street movement spreading across the country.

Written in 1906, Sinclair went undercover to write a novel that would reveal the horrors of the meat-packing industry, as well as greed and corruption in a time when business/politics/police walked hand in hand, exploiting the poor and powerless.

Though he had to fund its first printing itself, "The Jungle" would become a historically significant piece of literature for the impact it had on the food industry, which was in some ways, disheartening for the author. His celebrity rose, he said, "not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef."