In 1906, Upton Sinclair was twenty-seven years old he continued publishing for more than sixty years, a clattering typewriter that would not stop.

By common consent among literary historians, only one American novel, before or since-Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”-has had so powerful an influence on practical affairs. The book’s influence hit the dinner table as well: after a couple of years, meat consumption declined, and it was widely believed that Sinclair’s book was the cause. (Those were the days.) “The Jungle” played a major role in pushing forward the Pure Food and Drug Act, which Roosevelt had long favored, and which was passed in June of 1906, marking a major expansion of federal regulatory power. At the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, who had watched soldiers die from eating rotten meat during the Spanish-American War, wrote a three-page appreciation and critique of the novel, and sent it to Sinclair with an invitation to visit him. Dedicated to “the workingmen of America,” the book became an overnight best-seller.

Illustration by Edward SorelĪ hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim exposé of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Upton Sinclair: novelist, muckraker, socialist, utopian, pamphleteer, film producer, candidate, homeopath, fad dieter.

The jungle meat