I opened this book expecting a polemic that would disgust me, but what I found instead was an overly dramatic and somehow still boring series of misfortunes happening to a family that tried to survive in Chicago during the time of the Beef Trust and an influx of immigrants. The family themselves were so poorly drawn that I was unmoved by the terrible things that happened to them, and the writing was so absurd that I found myself rolling my eyes rather than sympathizing. Sinclair made no effort to make this book readable or infuse it with any character development (even after the main character loses himself in a rage that results in the loss of his house and the death of his wife, he literally does the exact same thing two years later for no reason), he simply slapped every bad thing he could imagine onto the lives of his fictional family, and then finished the book off with a series of yawn-inducing Socialist speeches. It has great historic value and zero literary quality.