This is well worth reading. It's known for its exposure of the horrors of industrial food and as a great early exemplar of a muckracking expose. It's great to engage with that context in mind. But it's also a good story of a man and many others trying to navigate his and their the impossibly Kafkaesque --no, much, much worse-- stations as the unskilled and the immigrant in turn of 20th-century Chicago. Welcome to the land of the free, you "tired, poor ... huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... wretched refuse ... homeless", etc., people.

The analysis feels relevant today because it motivates the puzzle of the failure of socialism in America. To read Upton Sinclair from 1906 you might imagine that it was only a matter of time, and that perhaps not long, before the industrial workingman threw off his chains. It's a massive understatement to say that he's overly sanguine about the collective action problem, about the power of half-cent propaganda rags, about the prevalence of rich and generous capitalists-turned-socialists who might provide good honest work to our heroic socialists, about the ease of alchemically transforming transcendental worldviews into material ones, and so forth.

The ending and some of the plot twists are a little too pat, though given Jurgis Rudkus's suffering that thought might qualify me as a sadist. Overall, I can't imagine a better snapshot of the particular time-slice of Americana Sinclair portrays: bottom-rung immigrants in the Chicago stockyards, ca. 1901-1904. Four stars.