The Jungle

我想，芝加哥现在的确是我的家乡了。

如同当年我对北京胡同，风俗有着无法抑制的热情一样，我现在对芝加哥的历史和政治也异常关注。芝加哥在我的心里不是摩天大厦，不是密执根湖，而是我住了10几年的海德园。

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote close to 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the 20th century, acquiring particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence.“

芝加哥是当年的屠宰业中心。挨着海德园就Back of the Yards：

Back of the Yards is an industrial and residential neighborhood so named because it was near the former Union Stock Yards. Life in this neighborhood, which was famously organized by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s, is profiled in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle. The area was formerly the town of Lake until it was annexed by Chicago in 1889. The area was once an Eastern European, predominantly Polish, neighborhood.

The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as only an exposure of the industry of meatpacking. This was not Sinclair's intention for the book though and not what he would have liked it to be famous for. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair's observations of the state of turn-of-the-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery.