How The Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives is Jacob A. Riis's landmark account of poverty, tenement housing, immigration, labour, childhood, and urban reform in late nineteenth-century New York. Drawing on his work as a journalist and pioneering documentary photographer, Riis exposed the crowded and often dangerous conditions of Manhattan's tenements, bringing middle-class readers face to face with the lives of workers, immigrants, children, lodgers, and families crowded into the city's poorest districts.

First published in 1890, the book became one of the defining works of American social reform and remains important in the history of journalism, photography, urban studies, poverty studies, and Progressive Era reform. Riis's text reflects the assumptions and language of his period, including attitudes toward race, ethnicity, class, immigration, and reform that modern readers may find troubling, but its historical force remains unmistakable. For readers of American history, social criticism, documentary photography, urban sociology, and reform literature, How the Other Half Lives is a foundational document of the modern city and the public conscience it helped awaken.

Jacob A. Riis was a Danish-born American journalist, photographer, lecturer, and social reformer whose work helped define modern documentary journalism. Born in Ribe, Denmark, in 1849, Riis emigrated to the United States as a young man and experienced poverty and insecurity before establishing himself as a newspaper reporter in New York City. His reporting on police work, tenement life, immigration, child poverty, and urban overcrowding gave him direct access to the conditions he later documented in How the Other Half Lives. The Library of Congress notes Riis's role in the history of tenement reform and his attention to the long struggle over conditions in neighborhoods such as Five Points and Mulberry Bend.Riis became one of the best-known reform journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using both words and images to make poverty visible to readers who might otherwise have ignored it. His work helped establish documentary photography as a tool of social witness, even as his writing also preserves many of the prejudices and reform assumptions of his time. How the Other Half Lives, first published in 1890, remains his central work: a major text in American social history, urban reform, immigration history, photojournalism, and the literature of poverty in the modern city.