The Jungle

It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija's broad shoulders.

Descent-and-conversion architecture—wedding feast, stockyard exploitation, Ona's death, Jurgis's vengeance, hoboing and crime, socialist awakening—strips the American Dream layer by layer until only collective action remains, so plot scores 88.

She stood in the doorway, shepherded by Cousin Marija, breathless from pushing through the crowd, and in her happiness painful to look upon. There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed.

Jurgis the willing immigrant, Ona the sacrificed wife, Marija the indomitable, Teta Elzbieta the survivor, and Connor the political boss make Packingtown a family under industrial siege, so cast scores 87.

shall sweep if before us—and _Chicago will be ours!_ Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

Thirty-one chapters accelerate through wedding, work, corruption, and collapse; final socialist chapters shift register abruptly—pace mirrors Sinclair's urgency from exposé to manifesto, so pace scores 86.

The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull "broom, broom" of a cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics.

Sinclair's journalistic narration gains power through accumulated detail of filth and injury; the wedding opening is surprisingly vivid before reportage takes over, so prose scores 85.

There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and the smoking rooms.

Packingtown as total environment—the killing beds, fertilizer plant, political ward, prison, socialist hall—is the most comprehensively rendered industrial hell in American fiction; the reader smells the stockyards, so world scores 94.

It was four o'clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas.

Ch.I's wedding procession—Marija's commanding voice, competing musicians and urchins—immediately establishes immigrant vitality about to meet the machine, so hook scores 90.

shall sweep if before us—and _Chicago will be ours!_ Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

The novel as legislative weapon—fiction designed to change law (the Pure Food Act), muckraking fused with melodrama; the socialist ending breaks literary convention as deliberately as Jurgis's individualism, so innov scores 91.

shall sweep if before us—and _Chicago will be ours!_ Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

"CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" is rhetorically thrilling and narratively abrupt—the conversion earns less than the suffering that precedes it, but the closing chant is unforgettable as propaganda and problematic as art, so ending scores 88.