This year marks the 100 th anniversary of the novel’s publication, and Penguin Classics has issued a hip-looking paperback edition of The Jungle complete with a Charles Burns drawing of a dead cow’s head on the cover. I first read it because it was assigned in high school, and what I remembered best, before reading it again recently, was that gruesome image of men falling into vats (a story Sinclair had heard while researching the book but that later couldn’t be verified), as well as the sense of unrelenting cold and misery that plagues the immigrant characters-and for that matter, immigrant characters, who didn’t figure largely in my pre-11 th-grade assigned reading. Sinclair’s book is one of those syllabus all-stars, renowned for its social impact more than for its qualities as a novel.
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