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Jacob Riis sailed to America from Denmark young, hopeful, and nearly broke. He slept in rough places, took any job he could find, and slowly became a newspaper reporter in New York. There he saw families crowded into dark, dirty tenements, and he used stories and photographs to show the rich what poverty looked like. His own story shows America as a hard place that can still reward courage.
Jacob Riis emigrated from Denmark in 1870 with forty dollars, a locket, and high hopes, and America nearly crushed him before it rewarded him. He tramped for work, slept in police lodging houses, and came close to despair more than once. Eventually his newspaper work in New York put him inside the tenement districts, and his book and photographs about them made his name.
The Making of an American, published in 1901, tells that whole immigrant arc in a warm and often funny voice. Riis recalls odd jobs, early failures, marriage, and his slow rise as a police reporter, then shows how reporting turned into reform campaigns against slums, bad water, and child misery. Friends appear generously throughout, including Theodore Roosevelt, who walked the night rounds beside him in Mulberry Bend.
Readers still value the book as a firsthand immigrant success story that refuses to forget those still in poverty. Riis's gratitude toward America is real, and so is his anger at what America tolerated in its slums. Anyone interested in New York history, photography, reform, or the immigrant experience will find him companionable, energetic, and impossible to mistake for a mere observer.
Jacob Riis came to America from Denmark in 1870 nearly penniless, worked at hard and humble jobs, and became a New York police reporter who exposed slum conditions with words and photographs. The Making of an American, published in 1901, tells that immigrant journey with warmth and humor. It offers a hopeful, firsthand account of poverty, perseverance, and gratitude in the land he chose.
Jacob Riis published The Making of an American in 1901, at the height of his reputation as the reporter whose flashlight photographs and lectures had forced New York to look at its tenements. The memoir explains the making behind the famous reformer: emigration from Denmark in 1870, years of casual labor, hunger, and nights in police lodging houses, then a break into newspaper work and the police beat that put him nightly inside the city's worst districts.
The book survives because Riis narrates his own Americanization without forgetting the men still sleeping where he once slept. Gratitude and indictment run side by side, and episodes like his campaign for clean water and small parks show reporting turning into reform. His friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, formed on midnight rounds, gives the later chapters a rare view of power at street level. First readers should expect dialect, sentiment, and period attitudes alongside the vivid reporting. As an immigrant memoir and a document of Progressive era conscience, it remains warm and indispensable.
Edition: Edition of 1901. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 6125.
The first chapter
The papers which form this autobiography were originally published in The Outlook, the chapter telling of my going "home to mother" in The Churchman, and parts of one or two others in The Century Magazine. To those who have been asking if they are made-up stories, let me say here that they are not. And I am mighty glad they are not. I would not have missed being in it all for anything.
J. A. R.
RICHMOND HILL, N.Y., October, 1901.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1901. Author died 1914. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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