Making of an American

Jacob Riis arrived in America with nothing but hunger and hope. This autobiography traces the improbable journey of a Danish immigrant who would become one of the most powerful voices for social reform in American history. Riis recounts his desperate early years in the United States, sleeping in boarding houses and drifting from job to job, before finding his calling as a reporter in lower Manhattan's teeming immigrant communities. But this is also a love story: his relentless, often comic courtship of Elizabeth, the woman who would become his wife, unfolds against the backdrop of his struggle to become someone worthy of her. What emerges is a vivid portrait of immigrant ambition, the rough apprenticeship of a journalist, and the moral awakening of a man who refused to look away from suffering. The book endures because it captures both the promise and the betrayal of America in the same breath, written by someone who lived on both sides of that divide.