Industrialization, immigration, corporate and government responsibility, the limits of capitalist power-Upton Sinclair's The Jungle foregrounds classic American issues and themes that are still debated today. The subject of renewed scrutiny by scholars particularly interested in the novel's ecological and environmental messages, the work's depiction of a meat-processing plant pressed the U.S. government into taking steps to regulate the industry for the benefit of workers and consumers. With an introduction by scholar Harold Bloom, this new gathering of full-length critical essays traces the legacy of a book that has come to exemplify literature in the service of social change.

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations, a series of more than 100 volumes, presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels, and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the writer's life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.