Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America

by Louis Adamic

Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Laughing in the Jungle was Louis Adamic at his most playful self—presenting an autobiography of first fifteen years in the United States as an immigrant from Slovenia. From the mailroom of the Narodni Glas Slavic daily in New York, to the silk mills of Pennsylvania, to his stint in the US Army, to four years of work as a port clerk in San Pedro, California, Adamic gives the steady path he took to becoming one of America’s foremost authors, journalists, and social critics. Always with a sense of humor, Adamic recounts his years as an immigrant “bystander and onlooker”—a witness to the jungle that is America.

“[ Laughing in the Jungle is] a most welcome addition to our social literature . . . [its] lively, refreshingly frank and accurate description . . . portrays a side of the country which many smug native sons are utterly unaware of.”—Saturday Review of Literature

About the

Born in Slovenia, Louis Adamic (1898-1951) immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen, fought in World War I, and later became a writer, translator, and editor. His writing, which included over fifteen books, focused on immigration and race. He was a founding editor of Common Ground, the literary magazine of the Common Council for American Unity, and was known as a social critic who fought for immigrant rights, cultural pluralism, and racial tolerance. His later work focuses on Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans, venturing into questions of interracial marriage and cultural clashes between “old-stock” Americans and the ethnic minorities that he argued made up the New Americans.

Genres: Labor, Nonfiction, American, Memoir

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Slovenian-born, he came to US at the age of 14. Socialist, he supported Tito and was friends with Rex Stout and Robinson Jeffers.

Reviews

[Metod Zupan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How do you measure a year in a life?" a question immortalized by the original cast of Rent way back in 1993, where they ponder if sunsets or perhaps cups of coffee are sufficient in measuring a year in a life of a woman or a man. I am asking this question here, because Louis Adamič had a prodigious answer to it, in his sort of autobiography Laughing in the Jungle. The author stars the book with his childhood in Slovenia and then covers the next 20 years of his life in which, the most notable is his move to the United States. But the book does not read as a typical biography, it reads conversationally, while describing the people Adamič meets and the stories he learns from them. This is in part due to him being a journalist, recording his experiences, but reading it closely, I found that his life and character, as they are presented in the book, are wholly constituted by the people he meets. Because who are we, if not a so-and-so year old collection of influences and ideas, to paraphrase a line form and En Knap performance Vertigo birds.
The book is very holistic not just in it's treatment of characters, but the setting as well. The jungle, America as it's central character (besides the author of course) remains an enigma until the end. Adamič does not set out to define America, such a task would be impossible to do, but he does his best to capture it, in a specific place and time. With the use of original metaphors and comparisons, he gives us lines like: "Being an American means drinking champagne from a rusty kettle." It is at this point that I would also like to praise the Slovenian translation by Stanko Leben, who achieves a truly immersive reading experience, precisely because he decided to omit translating so much of it.
Other than a masterwork in character study, the book also gives us a glimpse in the now largely forgotten or at least under discussed period of American history, the early 20th century immigrant working class experience, that by sacrificing their-own health and well-being built America to be great, because it had to be done, as the believed. And it is honestly sad to think about, that the dream they were fed enough that they started to believe it, and than realized it, is now used as a argument by the rich and powerful, to deny basic human rights exactly to them, immigrants and the working class.

[Yağmur · Rating 3 out of 5]

An astonishing place, America. One cannot love, nor hate it. It is terrible and magnificent and funny, vacillating between the sublime and the ridiculous. A place of contrasts and contradictions. It is scarcely possible to define it, or make any observation about it that cannot be refuted by a change of attitude or surroundings...It is, I repeat for the nth time, a jungle. It is impossible to really figure it out in any fundamental sense. It is best to laugh at it, though, of course, that is not always possible. But one must never, never take it too seriously - not yet.

[Errol · Rating 4 out of 5]

A forgotten classic. The Jungle is America. The only way to deal with it is with a sense of humor.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really fun autobiography by a now-forgotten journalist and writer who immigrated to the U.S. from Slovenia (then Austria-Hungary) just before the First World War. The writing is accessible and conversational, and it gives a great picture of the immigrant experience and America in general during the 1910s and ‘20s.

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. Pre-internet, I searched for this for over a decade with no luck. The author wrote my favorite book on labor history in the USA - Dynamite -- and this is an amazing period piece. A trip to a mostly forgotten part of American History.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of portraits of quasi-fictional characters, in the style of Joseph Mitchell's "Professor Seagull" and A.J. Liebling's "Honest Rainmaker", framed as the memoirs of a young immigrant during the hectic first decades of the 20th c.

[Marcie Hutchinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Laughing In The Jungle, prolific author, journalist, and activist Louis Adamic writes of his decision to emigrate from Slovenia and his early years as an immigrant in the United States. He was just 14 years old when he landed in New York. Intrigued by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, he worked and read his way across the United States from Brooklyn, NY to San Pedro, California. His early years as an immigrant are documented through his encounters with other immigrants who are also struggling to forge a life in America. While playing loose with the facts at times, the immigrant stories in this book are ones of resilience and tragedy during the period of American industrialism and urbanization as America entered World War I. As an engaging storyteller, Adamic dared to depict the humanity of the immigrant experience by telling each person’s story. Adamic’s immigrant experiences as a young man helped form his views on American culture and politics that would lead him to champion causes such as worker’s rights and ethnic and racial equality in his career as a writer.