The Jungle

With the instant success of The Jungle, Sinclair took his place in the ranks of the "muckrakers," a term that Theodore Roosevelt coined in 1906 to refer to a group of journalists who devoted themselves to exposing the ills of industrialization. The Jungle raised a public outcry against the unhealthy standards in the meatpacking industry and provoked the passage of The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. No novel since Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1851, had made such a social impact. The novel's success satisfied Sinclair's financial concerns but not his political motivations for writing it. Sinclair had intended the novel to elicit sympathy for the working class and build support for the Socialist movement. His readership, however, was more moved by the threat of tainted beef than the plight of the worker. Sinclair tried to translate the success of The Jungle into large-scale social change by building a utopian colony in New Jersey with the profits from the novel, but the colony burned down four months after its inception.