SOURCE: DeGruson, Gene. Introduction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: The Lost First Edition, edited by Gene DeGruson, pp. xiii-xxxi. Memphis: Peachtree Publishers, 1988.

In the following essay, DeGruson discusses the role of the Socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason in the publication of The Jungle.

In the summer of 1980 a young man brought to Pittsburg State University a small truckload of rotting, mildewed paper. He had been hired, he explained, to clean out a cellar of a nearby Girard, Kansas, farm. Upon seeing the name of Upton Sinclair on several pieces of correspondence, he decided that perhaps the material should go to the local university's library rather than to the county dump.

Too fragile to handle, the papers were covered with brightly colored mold, dyed purple by typewriter ribbon and red and green by inks used to write and print the documents. The fetid mass eventually proved to be...