Happy birthday, dear Upton...

Hello, Jungle readers. It's a pleasure to join your group. I just started the book, and it's not quite what I was expecting... the descriptions in the text are so dense that I find myself having to read more slowly than I read most fiction. It almost requires the reading labor of poetry. It's a good thing I'm into poetry...maybe I'll get through the rest of Chapter 1 this week. :)

I also wanted to let you all know that today is Upton Sinclair's birthday. I get a daily email from Bloomsbury Press, and this is what they had to say today:

On this day in literary history from http://www.bloomsbury.com

Upton Sinclair born 1878 in Baltimore

Upton Sinclair was one of the most popular novelists in America in the early decades of the twentieth-century, although his name appears to be increasingly absent from anthologies of the period. Winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Dragon’s Teeth, Sinclair was a social-realist who used his novels to dissect the many problems plaguing the America of his day. In The Jungle, he creates the character of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America with great hopes of making his fortune as he searches for the fulfilment of the American dream. However, his dreams are quickly trodden under foot when he becomes a meatpacker in the filthy Chicago stockyards, the ‘jungle’ of the title. In his scathing social commentary, Sinclair exposes the life of the common man, the conditions in which he was forced to work, and the meagre slave wages he had no choice but to accept.