![]() ![]() ![]() This redaction is the basis for See Sharp’s charge that the novel was “gutted” or, as Lee puts it, “expurgated.” According to De Grave, “since the socialists could not raise the revenue to adequately publish, promote, and distribute his book, the only alternative was to revise the novel in such a way that a capitalist publisher would accept it.Sinclair must have agonized over the revisions he made. The former had 36 chapters, the latter 31. The initial 1905 version of the novel had a different ending and was longer than the 1906 book known the world over as The Jungle. The See Sharp edition reproduces the One-Hoss text. An almost identical text was published in three installments between April and October 1905 in One-Hoss Philosophy, a small-circulation quarterly also published by Wayland. The Jungle was first published in serial form between February 25, 1905, and November 4, 1905, in The Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper with a nationwide readership edited by Fred Warren and published by J. The See Sharp edition recuperates a lesser-known, earlier version of the novel. And the novel, as eventually published in book form, has a political message that is perfectly clear.įirst issued as a book by Doubleday, Page in 1906, The Jungle was a straightaway international bestseller. He never wanted the 1905 serial version to become the standard edition. Sinclair did not revise the text to meet the coercive demands of a commercial publisher. Just one problem: none of the sensational claims made on behalf of the See Sharp edition is true. Go right to the original, now available, at a reasonable price, and feel and experience the real message that Upton Sinclair so deeply desired to convey to his readers” (May 29, 2004). The People’s Weekly World, newspaper of the Communist Party USA, states, “If you have never read The Jungle, don’t waste your time on the 1906 censored version. Is it any wonder that reviewers have found it impossible to resist the romance of a forgotten, authentic, suppressed version of The Jungle? Library Journal, in classifying the See Sharp edition as “essential,” deplores the novel’s “butchering” and claims “Sinclair later wanted to reinsert the expurgated material for a full-length version but that never came to fruition” (April 15, 2003). Inside is a foreword by Earl Lee, a librarian at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, who writes of “efforts of censors to subvert” The Jungle’s “political message” and states that Sinclair “changed The Jungle in order to get it published by a large commercial publisher.” An introduction by Kathleen De Grave, professor of American literature at Pittsburg State, suggests that Sinclair’s alterations were “not driven by a desire for artistic economy” but “produced under coercion, directly or indirectly.” The text restored by the See Sharp edition, she holds, is “closer to Sinclair’s true vision.” A slogan on the front cover, complete with exclamation point, denounces all competing editions as “censored commercial versions!” The back jacket touts it as “the version of The Jungle that Upton Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition-not the gutted, much shorter commercial version with which we’re all familiar.” Its subtitle proclaims it The Uncensored Original Edition. The See Sharp edition, however, is extraordinary for its fanfare. ![]() No publishing house, it seems, has ever lost money on The Jungle-something that cannot be said of many other works of socialist literature. Generations of readers have been transfixed by the misery of the novel’s protagonist, the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, in Chicago’s gruesome meatpacking industry. Editions of The Jungle, from the scholarly to the mass-market, are abundant. When a small, Tucson-based publisher of anarchist and atheist literature called See Sharp Press issued a new edition in 2003 of Upton Sinclair’s famous novel The Jungle, it was not especially remarkable. ![]()
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