Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

In 1905 there began to appear, in a Socialist weekly, the _Appeal to Reason_, published in Girard, Kansas, a novel of the Chicago stockyards, by an almost altogether unknown writer: _The Jungle_, by Upton Sinclair. I can remember, as a boy of eighteen, reading in my _Appeal_ that first chapter describing the wedding party of Jurgis and Ona, and my delight in the rich, full-blooded humanity of that scene. It was the happy prelude to what was to be, as week after week the story unrolled itself, a tragic panorama of working-class life, true, terrible, and magnificent.