I never "had" to read this one back in high school like so many others did. If you fall in to that category and didn't like it, then I suggest you give it a second try. I think it is especially relevant today given our current US political climate.

The novel is really two seperate stories. The first is the story of a young Lithuanian imigrant and his family who have left everything they've known and come to live the American dream at the dawn of the 20th century. That plan soon goes awry as he becomes enlightened to the realities of the poor: taken advantage of at every turn, forced to work in horrible conditions at an inhuman pace, and sucumbing to injuries that leave him out of work. That's the first story, about a man and his struggle.

The second story is the one that has made this book such an important one in American history. It is the story of "the system" in all of its unfairness, the story that lead to president Teddy Roosevelt's views on "muckraking" and led directly to the establishment of the US Food and Drug Administration. We've all experienced unfair situations in our lives but very few have had it piled on like what happens in this novel.

The final 30-40 pages are a diatribe on socialism and how that would correct all that's wrong with our system. I guess this added to the "importance" of the book in our history but the arguements are faulty and easily refuted. Our protagonist, however, is taken in and one assumes Upton Sinclair hopes the reader is as well. This is the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. Overall, the book is very readable, the plot moves along nicely, and I am very glad to have finally read this classic.

I read this book back in ninth grade for an English class because I had to. Something about it pulled me in, and made me remember it. Now, almost 20 years later, I bought and read it because I wanted to, and I'm glad. I got so much more out of it (even got to the end this time). This book will open your eyes to the way businesses in America were run, and how everyday folk are effected by them. A great read...now I'm passing it along to my best friends high school aged daughter.

It was kind of a dark book in that it seems like nothing goes right for Jurgis, but it keeps you captivated because you keep wanting something to go right for him so that he can obtain the American dream. One of my favorites.

A must read for anyone. I read this after reading Fast Food Nation. This definitely is a bit meatier than Fast Food Nation. I loved it!!! It also has made me thing more about the food I eat. I now refrain from eating meat/poultry whenever possible. Maybe eat it one time a week or less.

So much has already been written about 'The Jungle' it's hard to write an original review without resorting to personal impressions which simply echo others - like so many cows in a Chicago stockyard, I've joined millions of other Americans in a rite of passage through Sinclair's Packingtown (I never sausage a thing). But original discussion can always be found by asking: is the novel still worth reading today? Clearly many teachers think so, it is widely assigned in the classroom, in particular at the high school level. I partly attribute this to the books relative ease of reading (I finished it in 2 days), but it comes at the expense of artistic quality - it is a journalistic novel with a lot of facts and not a lot of things we might come to expect in a great work of art: the characters are often not well developed, there is not the beautiful language and heavy use of symbolism, and it ends on a purely propaganda note. Sinclair is more interested in the novels message than the characters, ironic given the message: people are more important than the system.

It is still worth reading for its historical detail of working class life at the turn of the century; as a lover of history I reveled in all the tiny details, not only of the meat packing but the clothes, the food, the types of jobs, the types of things people bought, attitudes, mannerisms and expressions. These were people of my great-grandparents generation, who my grandparents were born into, so it still remains personally relevant and fascinating. Another novel about Chicago from this time period, Sister Carrie (1900) does as good a job in the historical detail, but is a stylistically much more mature work of art - and it broke new ground in allowing "fallen women" to rise up and succeed, a taboo of the age - Sinclair's fallen women are "correctly" killed off or given no hope of improvement.

Because of The Jungle's historical importance in raising awareness of social issues - similar to what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for equality laws and Oliver Twist did for the working poor of England - as a novel of social improvement it will probably remain popular among educators who want to show fiction as more than just entertaining stories. In summary, the novel is a classic because it is a mythological part of the American reading landscape, and for its effects on US health laws. It is not a classic in the artistic sense, but still worthwhile for the historical detail about America at the turn of century.