The Parallels of Upton Sinclair's Life and Jurgis Rudkus's Life

Although I started out my blog with the curiosity of the creation of the FDA, I couldn’t help but wonder about the author Upton Sinclair after completing The Jungle. I wondered what had inspired him to write a novel that strongly expresses the various problems of our time. Therefore, I began to read about the life of Upton Sinclair and discovered there were a variety of life experiences that inspired him to write the novel. I used the link above to gain the information I write about in this post.

    Upton Sinclair, born on September 20, 1878, witnessed class differences from a young age. His family lived a life of penury because of his alcoholic father, whereas his mother’s side of the family lived a wealthy life. Sinclair later claimed that these experiences of regularly switching between classes was one of the reasons he became a Socialist. After reading this information, I can understand that his interest on this topic was started before he even realized it although people that Sinclair later met, such as Leonard Dalton Abbott, influenced him and turned him towards socialism. Sinclair also read books by a number of authors who supported socialism such as, Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, Frank Norris, and Robert Blatchford, that, along with the experiences that shaped him as a person, he wrote the novel, The Jungle. Although the novel was rejected by six publishers, it became very popular when it was published, even grabbing the attention of the president, Theodore Roosevelt.

    As I read about Sinclair’s life in this article, I realized that his life and the life of the fictional character in the novel, Jurgis, have numerous similarities and differences. The article stated Sinclair’s living conditions in the years he was growing up with the constant view of economic inequality in his life.  This relates to the Jurgis’s life when he comes to America and is forced to live a life of extreme poverty.  Jurgis sees the class differences among the people he goes to work with everyday and the men desperately looking for jobs versus the heads of the companies in the stockyards. The situation in where Jurgis is invited to Master Freddie’s house and is given a one hundred dollar bill relates greatly to the different lives that Sinclair experienced between his family members because it was explained in the novel that the rich Master Freddie gave away hundred dollar bills like they were nothing, and the view of Master Freddie’s house left Jurgis amazed. This alone shows how similar Jurgis and Sinclair truly are. On another note, the strong socialist ideology that formed in both Sinclair and Jurgis is also very similar. The life that both went through resulted in them strongly opposing capitalism and supporting socialism.

    To explain the differences in the two people, the main distinction is the difference in education. Sinclair, who went to college at the age of fourteen, got a proper education, whereas Jurgis did not get that opportunity. Also, another substantial difference is the fact that Jurgis spent most of this life unaware of socialist values and was introduced to them later in his life. On the other hand, Sinclair, exposed to the values and beliefs of a socialist early in his life, wrote The Jungle to reflect his strong opinions. Reading this article truly intrigued me more about this author when I realized how similar the author made the main character to be.