Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in
publishing essential American writings in authoritative
editions.
Jacob Riis s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title
from Rabelais s Pantagruel: One half of the world knoweth not how
the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of
that Country. An anatomy of New York City s slums in the 1880s, it
vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful
combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of the
other half, who might well have inhabited another country. The book
pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into
a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg
makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks
powerfully to us today of social injustice.
Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the
John Harvard Library edition of "How the Other Half Lives"
reproduces the text of the first published book version of November
1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis s original
photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New
York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.
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