The Jungle, written in 1906 by novelist and American journalist Upton Sinclair, depicts the lives of immigrants in the United States, particularly in Chicago and other industrialized areas. Readers were primarily concerned with the exposing of health breaches and filthy procedures in the early twentieth-century American meatpacking business, based on Sinclair's investigation for a socialist newspaper. Jurgis Rudkus is a young Lithuanian who immigrated to America in search of opportunity, fortune, and freedom. Soon, it becomes clear that the "packing town," the Chicago stockyards, is a bustling, filthy place where dreams perish in the jungle of human agony. Undercover, Upton documents the laborers' arduous labor, the inequities of "wage-slavery," and the perplexing jumble of urban life. Sinclair's work was so alarming that the government launched an investigation, which is chronicled in this engrossing novel that develops into a seminal piece of social change literature.