"There would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it." — Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
Sinclair's work is best understood as part of a broader movement of
- A
naturalist literature glorifying frontier individualism
- Bcheck_circle
muckraking journalism exposing corporate and social ills
- C
Harlem Renaissance cultural expression
- D
Lost Generation expatriate fiction
Explanation
Sinclair joined Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Jacob Riis in the muckraking tradition that drove Progressive Era reform from roughly 1900 to 1914.