Literary Families

Few if any fictional American families are as well-known as the Joad family, created by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. We may not immediately remember the names of individual members of the family, such as Tom or Rose of Sharon, but the name Joad is instantly recognized, even by many who have never read the book or seen the John Ford movie based on it, and it is name that carries instant connotations of "dust bowl," "Okies," and "Depression."

In contrast, the name of the Rudkus family, about whom Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle, has been almost entirely forgotten. The book itself is remembered primarily for its famous indictment of the Chicago meat-packing industry, an indictment that won national attention and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. In fact, however, the passages describing abuses in the packing industry are only one relatively small portion of the novel. Sinclair's own enduring reputation is that of journalist--the most noted of the "muckrakers"--not that of novelist.

The different fates of these books testify to the different emphasis and level of literary craft of their authors. Upton Sinclair was a journalist, first and foremost. His fictional characters never quite transcend his purpose in creating them. As a result, their story did not quite achieve the goals that Sinclair intended, even as journalism. The indictment of the packing industry was remembered; the broader indictment of the conditions i

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pens, that of Durham, a competitor of the company that has hired him. It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of a tear. The reader guesses more quickly than Jurgis does, perhaps, that for "hogs" one might substitute "Lithuanian immigrants." But he goes to the slaughter as innocently as the hogs. He had the feeling that this whole huge establishment had taken him under its protection, and had become responsible for his welfare. So guileless was he, and ignorant of the nature of business, that he did not even realize that he had become an employee of Brown's, and that Brown and Durham were supposed by all the world to be deadly rivals--were even required to be deadly rivals by the la

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