Compare the writing styles of John Steinbeck in The Harvest Gypsies and Upton Sinclair in The Jungle and explain how each author was effective in his own way. (PROVIDE direct evidence from the texts!)

While Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle, is a work of fiction, it has the journalistic quality of Steinbeck's newspaper column series, "The Harvest Gypsies." In fact, literary and history scholars view The Jungle as a detailed reportage of the urban working-class in major cities like Chicago. It also documented the appalling working conditions in factories and other manufacturing entities born directly out of the Industrial Revolution. Despite being a novel, The Jungle would directly lead to congressional inquiries and, eventually, laws regarding labor and industrial health regulations in the United States (e.g. Meat Inspection Act).
It is similar to "The Harvest Gypsies" in that both works document the working conditions of lower-class Americans during the early 20th century. Steinbeck's journalistic series focused on the Midwest and West Coast agrarian economies, particularly migrants from states like Oklahoma who found work in the Central Valley and Lower Colorado River Valley regions of California.
Since "The Harvest Gypsies" was a journalistic series, Steinbeck's tone and style is reportage, while Upton Sinclair had the literary freedom to explore creative techniques in his storytelling. Steinbeck's experience as a journalist would later directly inspire his literary work, namely The Grapes of Wrath, which features characters similar to the migrants he documented in "The Harvest Gypsies."
Despite their differing genres, both writers were effective in documenting their subject matter because of their detached perspective. Sinclair and Steinbeck are similar to ethnographers conducting field work on a particular culture, which in their case were people of the American lower working-class.
Another prominent difference between the two works is that Sinclair's novel contained highly-political commentary. This is due to Upton Sinclair's socialist background. In The Jungle, Sinclair acerbically writes, "The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie."
Since Steinbeck was employed as a reporter for The San Francisco News, he was constrained from making blatantly subjective statements such as those found in The Jungle. Steinbeck was also fond of exploring the philosophical and psychological elements of human behavior. Even in a journalistic text, Steinbeck writes in one of the "Harvest Gypsies" articles:

And if these men steal, if there is developing among them a suspicion and hatred of well-dressed, satisfied people, the reason is not to be sought in their origin nor in any tendency to weakness in their character.

While Sinclair was a political activist dressed up as a novelist, Steinbeck was more of an armchair philosopher. However, both writers explored the corruption of human nature by socioeconomic forces such as capitalism.