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The Jungle Essays

When Upton Sinclair wrote this book, he stirred not only the hearts but also the guts of many readers. Some say it induced nausea along with emotions; notwithstanding the sensation it caused with its unique theme and portrayal. The author himself had lived a life of abject poverty and had written...

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The Jungle: The Appeal of Socialism During the late 1800's and early 1900's hundreds of thousands of European immigrants migrated to the United States of America. They had aspirations of success, prosperity and their own conception of the American Dream. The majority of the immigrants believed...

In The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, and The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, the characters are forced with economic, social, and political problems that they must cope with throughout the story. Both books are similar in that they emphasize that in this country, one simply cannot win unless they...

Upton Sinclair had always insisted that The Jungle was misread but did he ever think it could have been miswritten? The style of writing is not effective when addressing issues in a capitalistic society but proves to be very effective when exposing the secrets of the meatpacking industry. The...

Draft 1- Letter to the Editor paper U. S. History 4th hour Nov. 10 1665 65th Street Chicago, Illinois 49408 Chicago Tribune 1864 Rutherford Street Chicago, Illinois November 10, 1900 To Whom It May Concern I am a concerned resident of the great city of Chicago who would like to express a few ideas...

Stephan Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Street" and Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" are both representing the real life when they are compared with each other. The events and the opinions in these short stories are corresponding with naturalistic thought and it is showed by observation technique to the...

Some novels and plays portray the consequences that occur when individuals pursue their own personal good at the expense of the common good of the group or society. Choose a novel or play, and write a well-organized essay that explains how the interests of a character or group of characters...

Recent United States History Class Number 8469 March 2, 2005 The Jungle Analysis Paper America, by the turn of the twentieth century, was regarded as the "Land of Opportunity," and lured thousands of immigrants. The foreigners that fled to the United States were in search of new lives; better lives...

The Jungle: Critical Analysis The Jungle is a novel that focuses its story on a family of immigrants who came to America looking for a better life. It was written by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, who went into Chicago and the stockyards to investigate what life was like for the people who...

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In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair uses a true to life story to demonstrate the working man's life during industrialization. Marx depicts in the Communist Manifesto an explanation of why the proletariat is worked so hard for the benefit of the bourgeois, and how they will inevitably rise up from it and...

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Several years before and after the turn the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a large influx of European immigration. These new citizens had come in search of the American dream of success, bolstered by promise of good fortune. Instead they found themselves beaten into failure by...

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Sinclair's novel does accurately portray times and events that happened during this time period in the United States. To get this information Sinclair stayed in Chicago and investigated the issues for 7 weeks before writing the jungle. He was hired by a Newspaper to write the book. So the novel is...

In the early 1900's life for America's new Chicago immigrant workers in the meat packing industry was explored by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Originally published in 1904 as a serial piece in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair's novel was initially found too graphic and...

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The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair was a very touching and motivating story. Sinclair aimed for our hearts, but instead, he hit our stomachs. The Jungle is a story of hardships and trouble, some successes and many failures as a family tries to achieve the "American Dream. " In this book, "The...

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In the world of economic competition that we live in today, many thrive and many are left to dig through trashcans. It has been a constant struggle throughout the modern history of society. One widely prescribed example of this struggle is Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle. The...

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The book The Jungle was introduced as a novel by Upton Sinclair was financed and published with his own money. Upton Sinclair was a famous novelist and social crusader from California. He was born on 20 September 1878 in Baltimore Md. He was the only child of Priscilla Harden and Upton Beall...

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The main theme of The Jungle is the evil of capitalism. Every event, especially in the first twenty-seven chapters of the book, is chosen deliberately to portray a particular failure of capitalism in Sinclair’s view, inhuman and violent. The slow total destruction of Jurgis’s immigrant family at...

In Kenyatta’s The Gentlemen of the Jungle, man renders space in his hut to elephant who seeks shelter from man. Man resorts to violence after elephant and the rest of the animals take advantage of his kindness. “ my deer good man, will you please let me put my trunk inside your hut to keep it out...

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Josel Wong Mr. Wear AP Language and Composition 5 November 2009 The Jungle Questions Part I 1. The wedding between Jurgis and Ona is an epitome of the various problems in Packingtown. The way the saloon keeper took advantage of the couple is representative of the dishonesty and thievery from the...

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During the late 1800s and early 1900s hundreds of thousands of European immigrants migrated to the United States of America. The book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair focuses on the meat packing industry and the hardships and obstacles the immigrants faced. This book had an amazing impact as...

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“The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling Essay (Critical Writing)

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

There is a great number of different masterpieces of literature in the world. Each of them describes some peculiar phenomenon or event. The majority of books are devoted to human beings and their feelings and emotions. There are, however, some works which are devoted to animals and their touching allegiance to people. Being very popular, this issue has always interested people. However, there are not many works which manage to combine description of the life of human beings, animals behaviour and visions of nature, trying to show the authors way of to reflect the real world. One of these works is called The Jungle Book and is written by Rudyard Kipling.

Devoted to the description of the life of a human being, the book, though, manages to combine this description with the visions of nature of the jungle and the laws according to which animals live there.

The main character of the story is a boy called Mowgli. The main peculiarity of this boy is the fact that he was raised by wolves and acts according to their code. In certain period of time this fact was taken as ridiculous and impossible. However, boys like Mowgli were found. That is why, it is possible to say that Kipling created a very interesting story which could be based on some real facts. Mowgli is able to understand animals and communicate with them, following the rules accepted in the jungle. All these facts make him a unique character who is very interesting for people.

Having created his story in the form of a tale, Kipling romanticized the life of animals and human beings in the jungle. However, there is one very important aspect of the jungle which the author describes. It is the law according to which animals live. Kipling uses the term the law of the jungle to describe existing set of codes according to which the community of wolves and other animals is structured. They all should follow it or they will not be able to survive.

All rules which are described by this law are wise and created by generations of animals in order to guarantee their survival. The law of the jungle outlines the main activity of animals, their main food and relations with other species. However, the Bandar-log do not accept these rules. They can be taken as rebels, who do not want to follow the majority. However, Kipling describes them as primitive and disorganised tribe which is not able to guarantee its prosperity. Outlining this fact, the author wants to show great importance of the law and norms which regulate behaviour in society.

Being created by Rudyard Kipling, the term the law of the jungle became very popular, though having changed its main meaning. Nowadays, it is widely used in order not to describe some set of codes accepted in society, but to show special kind of human attitude to the rest of people and his/her role in society. Everyone should take care only of himself/herself and be the strongest to survive in coherent society. This is the meaning of the term which prevails nowadays.

Besides, having read the book, it is impossible to remain indifferent. Having created interesting and fascinating world, Kipling also introduced the new term which described existence of animals in the jungle. The term the law of the jungle became the metaphor which is widely used nowadays.

• "The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling
• One Character, Two Worlds: "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling
• Postcolonial Theories in “Overland Mail” by Rudyard Kipling
• William Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"
• Stylistics of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
• Ethical Issues in the Novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
• Joseph Conrad’s Novel "Heart of Darkness"
• Iago and Othello Relationships
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Ploughshares welcomes unsolicited submissions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction during our regular reading period,  open from June 1 to January 15   at noon EST . The literary journal is published four times a year: blended poetry and prose issues in the Winter and Spring, a prose issue in the Summer, and a special longform prose issue in the Fall. Our Spring and Summer issues are guest-edited by different writers of prominence.  To submit to the journal, including the Fall Longform Issue, please see our  guidelines here .

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by Upton Sinclair

The jungle essay questions.

What is the symbolism of Tamoszius Kuszleika's violin playing in the first chapter?

The symbolism of Tamoszius Kuszleika's violin playing in the first chapter works on two levels. In the first, Tamoszius's music symbolizes a bridge between the old world of Eastern Europe, which the immigrant community of Sinclair's novel had left behind, and the new world of America. The music literally brings their immigrant past into the present. On a second level, Sinclair is describing his own writing by comparing his descriptive ability to the music. By noting, "His notes are never true," Sinclair is telling the reader that his writing is only a partial illumination of the plight of this immigrant population. He is hinting that the truth of their poverty is not fully accessible through the novel.

Why or why not is Packingtown a modern version of chattel slavery?

Sinclair describes the immigrant's life as a modern form of slavery because of the economic situation that immigrant populations find themselves in upon moving to Packingtown. Although these immigrants have no physical chains, Sinclair notes repeatedly how they have no real freedom because the packing plants are the only means of survival for these families. Economic systems of control make it impossible for families to break cycles of poverty. As soon as a person makes money, powerful capitalist interest finds ways to take it away. In this way, it is impossible for people to lift themselves out of Packingtown, and thus, they are slaves to a system they cannot control.

How would you describe Sinclair's vision of The American Dream?

For Sinclair, the American Dream is not the ability of a person to make a life for themselves through hard work and sacrifice. This, he argues, is impossible. Poor immigrants become trapped in cycles of poverty that do not allow them to experience real freedom. The promise of America, he writes, is in the ability of working people to choose collective action against the manipulators of the capitalist economy. Through banding together, working people are able to improve their own lives by controlling the means of production and the flows of capital.

Although The Jungle does not take place in an actual jungle, how does Sinclair create a jungle-like atmosphere in the novel?

The chief way that Sinclair creates a wild, unordered setting in the novel, is by devolving his characters from human beings into representations of animals. As the novel progresses, Sinclair suggests that the tortuous conditions of Packingtown choke out the humanity in Jurgis and his family. One particular representative scene is when Jurgis attacks Ona's boss after he rapes her. Jurgis becomes an unthinking animal, roused to anger by an attack on his family. He responds with his own violence, eschewing the structures of justice and order. By becoming animals, Jurgis and his family fall victim to the horrors of Social Darwinism.

How is the industrialization process responsible for the degradation of workers?

According to Sinclair, the growing industrialization of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries degrades workers and their families through mechanisms of use and abuse. Growing industrial corporations, such as the meat packing plants, seek to use the resources of workers until those workers can no longer sustain their pace of work. In this way, industries see workers not as humans but as impersonal resources. This allows them to deny human civility. Sinclair argues that in a capitalist society, the result will always be that workers are degraded as humans in order to maximize profit and power for the elite few.

Is The Jungle propaganda?

The Jungle is an example of muckraking propaganda, a form of journalism that was especially prevalent in the early twentieth century. Sinclair purposefully sought to write a novel that would elicit strong emotional and moral responses from individuals. These individuals, Sinclair believed, would then feel compelled to act in certain moral ways, especially in advocating for the rights of workers. Sinclair's novel did not always produce the intended effect, however, since the reform of the food industry was the chief result of his efforts rather than the reform of working conditions.

How is The Jungle an example of American Naturalist writing?

Sinclair's novel falls into the American Naturalist tradition. This tradition created characters whose narratives are completely reliant on the natural world around them. In Sinclair's novel, Jurgis and his family are victims of the natural world they inhabit. Their lives are dependent upon the "horrible nature of nature," as Sinclair describes it. They have no internal mechanisms of thought or criticism to help them escape the horrors of the lives they lead. The novel has been criticized for relying too heavily upon Naturalism and not allowing the characters to develop any sense of internal agency.

If Jurgis Rudkus is the novel's protagonist, who would you say is the novel's antagonist?

Sinclair does not use a single character as an antagonist to Jurgis and his family. Instead, Sinclair's antagonist is the system of capitalism that oppresses its workers. While the packing plant owners are villains in the novel, Sinclair does not suggest that there is anything innately horrible within their selves. Instead, these men use a corrupt economic system to oppress others. This is a horrible action, certainly, but such actions would not take place without systems of economics and politics.

Is Jurgis better off at the novel's end?

Jurgis is not necessarily better off in a physical way at the novel's end. He is still in poverty, though he does hold a steady job as a hotel porter. Jurgis is better off, however, in that the ideas of socialism have intellectually and spiritually awakened him. These ideas have brought into his life hope, something that was lacking in Jurgis's life in America. In this way, Jurgis can return to a state of empowerment that he felt when first coming to America. Some critics panned the novel's ending, claiming that by not resolving Jurgis's struggle in any comprehensive way, the novel does not complete its artistic mission.

Discuss the treatment of the body in The Jungle .

Sinclair uses the body as the center of capitalism's torment on his characters. While many of the hardships that the family first endures begin as mental hardships, they quickly become physical hardships as well. Because Sinclair's characters have little inner mental and emotional development, the physical body becomes the symbol for how a person is enslaved and broken down by the systems of greed and corruption in Chicago's Packingtown. This is especially true for the female characters in the novel. Their bodies suffer the effects of nature during childbirth, a process that Sinclair sees as breaking and often killing the woman in some fundamental way, as in Ona’s case.

The Jungle Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Jungle is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is the main assumption underlying the author’s thinking?

The author main thinking is the whole article or essay that you are reading anywhere. The author is doing an explanation for the depth of their mind that they want to explain in front of the world. If the students who wish to become a writer in...

What loaded language does the author use throughout the passge

What passage are you referring to?

In Chapter One, a crisis occurs when the family cannot raise the money needed to pay for the wedding. This results in increased hardships and a darker mood for the family with Jurgis’s promise to “work harder.”

Study Guide for The Jungle

The Jungle study guide contains a biography of Upton Sinclair, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Jungle
• The Jungle Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Jungle

The Jungle essays are academic essays for citation. These literature papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

• "The Jungle: Fiction, History, or Both?"
• Upton Sinclair's Indictment of Wage Slavery in The Jungle
• Preying on the Immigrant Experience: Sinclair's The Jungle
• The (Literal) Jungle: Symbolism and Meaning in Sinclair's Narrative
• Muckrakers: Differing Styles in Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser

Lesson Plan for The Jungle

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Jungle
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Jungle Bibliography

E-Text of The Jungle

The Jungle e-text contains the full text of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

• Chapters 1-5
• Chapters 6-10
• Chapters 11-15
• Chapters 16-20
• Chapters 21-25

Wikipedia Entries for The Jungle

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Publication history

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Six Boston-area students pen winning Holocaust essays

An annual Massachusetts essay contest to commemorate the Holocaust produced winning entries that drew on local students’ experiences with alienation and bias in a society still grappling with racism and antisemitism while also noting the importance of preserving family stories of struggle.

The competition, sponsored by the family of the late Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston, featured entries from a number of students of color. The 400–800-word essays were submitted by middle and high school students.

The six winners of the 18th Annual Israel Arbeiter Holocaust Essay Contest honored at the State Room in Boston included Sean Gabriel Biteranta, an 11th grader at Stoughton High School, Rex Chen, an 8th grader at Hingham Middle School and Heaven Rowell, a 12th grader at Stoughton High School, who each received framed certificates from Arbeiter’s son, Jack.

Also receiving certificates were Chris Bingham, an 8th grader at the Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, Eliana Goldenholz, a 10th grader at the Maimonides School in Brookline, and Nathan Pichardo, an 8th grader at Tenney Grammar School in Methuen. They will all be going on a November trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Biteranta, who was born in the Philippines and lived in California before moving to Stoughton with her family, wrote about survival and the importance of re-telling your stories.

“Human life is a centuries-long story of survival, and if we’re lucky enough, someone will listen to our stories and preserve them,” she wrote. “In doing so, we preserve our ability as human beings to feel for one another.”

Rex Chen and Eliana Goldenholz (first-place winners) lighting the candle for All the Children. PHOTO: COURTESY JCRC BOSTON/ JOHN RICH PHOTOGRAPHY

In his essay, Chen wrote, “These testimonies are vital to preserving historical truths, promoting sympathy, and inspiring action toward injustice in society today.”

“They remind us of the effects of hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. They force us to confront the truths about humanity’s evil power and find solutions.”

Pichardo’s essay emphasized the validity of the testimonies. “Survivor stories aren’t just like books we can read for fun,” he wrote. “They’re real-life tales that teach us important lessons.”

Each student had learned about the Holocaust prior to the contest and felt an affinity with the victims of almost a century ago.

“I was taught a lot of valuable lessons about life and love,” Biteranta told the Banner, recalling early life in the Philippines.

“I’m a minority myself, being an immigrant Filipino, so I’ve definitely experienced discrimination,” Biteranta continued. “I don’t necessarily have similar experiences to those of the victims of the Holocaust, but from years of self-improvement, I was able to teach myself empathy. So while I may not exactly be able to relate, I was able to put myself in their shoes and feel what they felt.”

Chen’s mother, a teacher, and his father, who works in a restaurant, came to the U.S. during the early 2000s. In 2019, his family moved from Quincy to Hingham.

“My parents were Chinese immigrants who had to overcome physical and mental obstacles,” Chen told the Banner. “And now, they carry their own stories of hope and survival.”

Like the others, Chen didn’t just learn about the Holocaust – he applied it in context to his own life. “Compared to the struggles Jews faced during the Holocaust, I have it much easier,” he acknowledged. “Everything seems given to me. I have good food, nice clothes, and a stable roof over my head.”

But he knows that not everyone is that fortunate, and like Jews in late 1930s Europe, it can all disappear in a moment.

“I realize many of the things I regularly take for granted never seem important until they are taken away,” Chen said. “And so I learned about the different paths Holocaust survivors took to save themselves and the people they loved. I learned the importance of getting up and trying again, even after being beat down and stepped on time after time. I also learned the importance of forgiveness.”

And of bravery. “Nothing will change if you don’t do anything to change it,” he added. “No one will care unless you advocate. And no one will remember unless you teach.”

“I was overwhelmed with sympathy and admiration for the reality and strength of the survivors and Jewish community,” Rowell told the Banner. “Not just out of a place of empathy, but from a place of understanding, of being an African American and sharing a similar history.”

“Growing up, I felt out of place in society and experienced the claws of racism at a very early age,” Rowell explained. “I noticed many things, like how my family was the only Black family on our street, how people would look as I walked around a store with my mom, or how I got in trouble when a little white girl called me the ‘N-word’ in 5th grade.”

“Most of these Holocaust stories did not come out in one stroke, and in Anne Frank’s and Oskar Schindler’s cases, not even by themselves,” Biteranta wrote in her essay, “but rather by those around them who listened and preserved their stories for the world to recognize.”

All look forward to the trip to Washington. Biteranta, who has never been there, is excited to experience it, as is Chen. “I hope to learn more about World War II and the Holocaust in detail,” he said. “I also want to gain a deeper understanding of how my country operates, and of American culture. And finally, I want to take in the vibrance of the city and its food, monuments, and art.”

Arbeiter, a Holocaust survivor who settled in Newton and who died in 2021 at age 96, was born in Plock, Poland, and was 14 when World War II erupted. His parents and younger brother died at Treblinka, and he and his two remaining brothers worked in slave labor at other Nazi concentration camps that included Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After the war, he founded the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, co-founded the New England Holocaust Memorial, and worked tirelessly to promote awareness about the Holocaust and to preserve the memories of its victims.

His work continues to inspire students like this year’s winners.

“Israel Arbeiter worked hard to make sure we don’t forget about the Holocaust and how it changed the world,” Pichardo wrote in his essay. “He wants us to understand what happened, so we can learn from it.”

Chen’s essay imagines a better world based on Arbeiter’s teachings. “By creating a society centered around tolerance, compassion and dignity, people can continue to honor the victims of the Holocaust and strive for a greater future,” he wrote. “As Israel Arbeiter said, ‘There is ne ver enough remembering.’”

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A charming look at a reader’s many moods

Elisa Gabbert’s essays in “Any Person Is the Only Self” are brimming with pleasure and curiosity about a life with books.

Tell people you read and write for a living, and they picture a ghostly creature, an idea only incidentally appended to a body. What they often fail to understand is that the life of the mind is also a physical life — a life spent lugging irksomely heavy volumes around on the Metro and annotating their margins with a cramping hand. The poet, essayist and New York Times poetry columnist Elisa Gabbert is rare in grasping that reading is, in addition to a mental exercise, a movement performed in a particular place.

“If I remember anything about a book, I also remember where I read it — what room, what chair,” she writes in her charming new essay collection, “ Any Person Is the Only Self .” Writing, too, proves spatial: “I think essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should function as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood.”

The 16 delightfully digressive pieces in this collection are all moods that involve books in one way or another. But they are not just about the content of books, although they are about that, too: They are primarily about the acts of reading and writing, which are as much social and corporeal as cerebral.

In the first essay — the foyer — Gabbert writes about the shelf of newly returned books at her local library. “The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me,” she writes. “They weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were very often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype.” The haphazard selections on the shelf were also evidence of other people — the sort of invisible but palpable community of readers that she came to miss so sharply during the pandemic.

In another essay, she learns of a previously unpublished story by one of her favorite authors, Sylvia Plath, who makes frequent appearances throughout this book. Fearing that the story will disappoint her, Gabbert puts off reading it. As she waits, she grows “apprehensive, even frightened.”

There are writers who attempt to excise themselves from their writing, to foster an illusion of objectivity; thankfully, Gabbert is not one of them. On the contrary, her writing is full of intimacies, and her book is a work of embodied and experiential criticism, a record of its author’s shifting relationships with the literature that defines her life. In one piece, she rereads and reappraises books she first read as a teenager; in another, she and her friends form a “Stupid Classics Book Club,” to tackle “all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had.”

Gabbert is a master of mood, not polemic, and accordingly, her writing is not didactic; her essays revolve around images and recollections rather than arguments. In place of the analytic pleasures of a robustly defended thesis, we find the fresh thrills of a poet’s perfected phrases and startling observations. “Parties are about the collective gaze, the ability to be seen from all angles, panoramically,” she writes in an essay about fictional depictions of parties. She describes the photos in a book by Rachael Ray documenting home-cooked meals — one of the volumes on the recently returned shelf — as “poignantly mediocre.” Remarking on a listicle of “Books to Read by Living Women (Instead of These 10 by Dead Men),” Gabbert wonders, “Since when is it poor form to die?”

“Any Person Is the Only Self” is both funny and serious, a winning melee of high and low cultural references, as packed with unexpected treasures as a crowded antique shop. An academic text on architecture, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a rare memory disorder whose victims recall every aspect of their autobiographies in excruciatingly minute detail, “Madame Bovary,” YouTube videos about people who work as professional cuddlers, a psychological study about whether it is possible to be sane in an insane asylum — all these feature in Gabbert’s exuberant essays. She is a fiercely democratic thinker, incapable of snobbery and brimming with curiosity.

Perhaps because she is so indefatigably interested, she gravitates toward writers who see literature as a means of doubling life, allowing it to hold twice as much. Plath confessed in her journals that she wrote in an attempt to extend her biography beyond its biological terminus: “My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” The very act of keeping a diary, then, splits the self in two.

Plath once insisted that bad things could never happen to her and her peers because “we’re different.” Gabbert asks “Different why?” and concludes that everyone is different: “We are we , not them. Any person is the only self.” But that “only” is, perhaps counterintuitively, not constrained or constricted. Walt Whitman famously wrote that his only self comprised “multitudes,” and Gabbert echoes him when she reflects, “If there is no one self, you can never be yourself, only one of your selves.” And indeed, she is loath to elevate any of her many selves over any of the others. When she rereads a book that she loved in her adolescence, she thinks she was right to love it back then. “That self only knew what she knew,” she writes. “That self wasn’t wrong .” Both her past self and her present self have an equal claim to being Elisa Gabbert, who is too fascinated by the world’s manifold riches to confine herself to a single, limited life.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

Any Person Is the Only Self

By Elisa Gabbert

FSG Originals. 230 pp. $18, paperback.

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Adam Neumann Lists His Triplex Penthouse, Again. Asking? $25 Million.

The WeWork founder is selling his marquee New York City apartment, a four-bedroom aerie that overlooks Gramercy Park.

By Andy Newman

Adam Neumann has been doing some downsizing.

For several years, the maverick co-founder of what was once the most valuable American start-up, WeWork, has been offloading luxury estates almost as prodigiously as he once stockpiled them.

Gone is the 12,000-square-foot manse on 27 Marin County acres with the guitar-shaped living room and three-story water slide. Gone is the Greenwich Village townhouse . Gone, too, are at least one of the chateaux in Westchester County and at least one of the Hamptons getaways. Mr. Neumann owned the properties with his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann.

His wallet has shed some bulk as well. His Forbes net worth , adjusted for inflation, is down 54 percent since 2019 — despite Mr. Neumann’s receipt of a severance package worth hundreds of millions after he left WeWork, the co-working company he led to the brink of collapse. (He is still, however, worth a respectable $2.3 billion, up from $1.4 billion in 2022.)

Last week, he dropped a bid to reacquire WeWork , which had filed for bankruptcy reorganization last fall and whose stock price has tumbled more than 99.999 percen t from its 2021 peak.

And now, for at least the third time, the Neumanns have listed their marquee New York City dwelling, a 6,630-square-foot, three-story-plus-rooftop perch atop a fortresslike apartment building that peers down at Gramercy Park. The asking price is $24,995,000.

The four-bedroom penthouse, on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of 78 Irving Place, is a testament to Mr. Neumann’s wealth and taste.

“We’re looking at essentially just a townhouse in the sky,” said Eleonora Srugo, one of the Douglas Elliman brokers handling the listing.

“It’s very Parisian-inspired, filled with a ton of quiet luxury, but then there are pops of a little bit more over-the-top magic,” said her colleague Jordyn Taylor Braff.

Ah, the pops.

The nautilus-cious spiral staircase. The 30,000-watt starlight installation depicting the Milky Way, suspended above a custom bed so many light-years across that Ms. Braff abandoned the traditional mattress size hierarchy and decreed it “ginormous.”

The riotously pink kid’s bathroom. The other kid’s bathroom designed to resemble the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine , complete with porthole windows. The playroom walls covered with embossed patterns of leaves and vines.

Most of the metal fixtures — faucets, doorknobs and the like — are made of silver. “There’s like marble wainscoting in the shower,” Ms. Braff noted.

The architectural redesign is by Pietro Cicognani. The interior is by Windsor Smith. The chandeliers are by John Rosselli and Associates. If you have to ask who any of these people are, you probably can’t afford it.

The 955-square-foot roof terrace, which already has a barbecue zone, has hookups for water and electricity so that the buyer can “create their little wonderland on a roof,” Ms. Braff said. Or go the other way and “make it this jungle oasis,” she added, expanding upon the existing boxwood plantings by Audrey in the Garden. Or both!

The penthouse may be a bit of a bargain. Adjusted for inflation, the price is 40 percent below the $27.5 million the Neumanns paid for the space in 2017 before doing extensive renovations. It has been listed in combination with either a duplex on the first floor or a carriage house next door for as much as $37.5 million. But according to Douglas Elliman, this is the first time the penthouse has been marketed separately. The taxes on it are $163,400 per year.

Douglas Elliman said in a statement that Mr. Neumann sought to part with the penthouse because his family had not lived in it since 2019.

If the penthouse finally sells, it will not leave the Neumanns and their six children homeless. They appear to be hanging on to Linden Farm, their 60-acre estate with a waterfall and a horse-riding ring in Pound Ridge, N.Y.

And sometime after 2021, The New York Post reported , the Neumanns moved into a “palatial new home” in “an exclusive private neighborhood in Miami” along 360 feet of waterfront with multiple marina slips, on property for which they had paid $44 million.

Mr. Neumann, 45, has further plans to rebuild his wealth, too. In 2022, he founded a real estate company called Flow . Its mission is to build rental developments that foster a feeling of ownership and community.

Andy Newman  writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Andy Newman

The State of Real Estate

Whether you’re renting, buying or selling, here’s a look at real estate trends..

A Flooding Florida ‘Paradise’:  In the Shore Acres neighborhood of St. Petersburg, rising water has become a constant threat. Many residents cannot afford  to elevate their homes or move.

Muhammad Ali’s Childhood Home:  The boxing champion lived in the one-story house in Louisville, Ky., which in recent years became a museum. It’s listed for sale, along with two neighboring properties, for $1.5 million. Here’s a look at it .

A New Hamptons Nightclub:  Scott Sartiano proposed bringing his Manhattan-based members-only hot spot, Zero Bond, to a historic village inn. East Hampton residents are not rolling out  the red carpet.

Stuck in a Starter Home:  Squeezed by high interest rates and record prices, homeowners are frozen in place . They can’t sell, so first-time buyers can’t buy.

What Is Fair Housing?:  There are laws to protect people from discrimination in buying, renting and living in their homes. Here’s a look at them .