“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” So lamented Upton Sinclair, author of the novel The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the corruption and contamination in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Sinclair was one of the most famous muckrakers of the Progressive Era, and had written The Jungle in 1905 to raise public awareness of the exploitation and foul conditions to which workers in the meatpacking industry were subjected.
