Join Mark Canada and historian Chris Young for the first in-person Moving Experience: "Welcome to the Jungle: Upton Sinclair, Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, and Investigative Fiction."

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Novelist Upton Sinclair famously said of his best-known novel, The Jungle, an exposé of Chicago’s meat-packing industry, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Sinclair sought to arouse a reaction—a heartfelt one, we might say—to the exploitation of immigrants like his protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his family. His graphic descriptions of the meat-packing process, however, wound up upsetting the stomachs, figuratively or even literally, of readers.

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In this Moving Experience tour of Chicago, we will explore the locations relevant to Sinclair's investigation during the turn of the century.