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Its a Jungle Out There The Jungle has been compared to the writings of Leo Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century Russian novelists and to such French naturalists as Zola in its complete pessimism, its mood of black despair, and unrelieved tragedy. The setting is the stockyards and slums of Chicago. A succession of races--the Germans, the Irish, the Bohemians, the Poles, the lithuanians, the Slovaks--had followed each other as stockyard workers, lured from their Old World …

…a nightmare of misery, an inferno of suffering, a human hell, a jungle of wild beasts ... What ‘Uncle Toms Cabin’ did for the black slaves ‘The Jungle’ has a large chance to do for the white slaves of today.”(349) Bibliography * Ebenstein, William. “Today’s –isms.” Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970. * Sinclair, Upton. “The Jungle.” New York, New York: The New American Library, 1906 * Herms, Deiter, ed. Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social Reform. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990