How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis's famed 1890 photo-text addressed the problems of tenement housing, immigration, and urban life and work at the beginning of the Progressive era. David Leviatin edited this complete edition ofHow the Other Half Livesto be as faithful to Riis's original text and photography as possible. Uncropped prints of Riis's original photographs replace the faded halftones and drawings from photographs that were included in the 1890 edition. Related documents added to the second edition include a stenographic report of one of Riis's lantern-slide lectures that demonstrates Riis's melodramatic techniques and the reaction of his audience, and five drawings that reveal the subtle but important ways Riis's photographs were edited when they were reinterpreted as illustrations in the 1890 edition. The book's provocative introduction now addresses Riis's ethnic and racial stereotyping and includes a map of New York's Lower East Side in the 1890s. A new list of illustrations and expanded chronology, questions for consideration, and selected bibliography provide additional support.

DAVID LEVIATIN (Ph.D., Harvard) has taught American studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Rhode Island, and Charles University in Prague. In addition to the publication of numerous articles, Leviatin is the author of Prague Spring: Notes and Voices from the New World (1993) and Followers of the Trail: Jewish Working-Class Radicals in America (1989). He is also a freelance photographer whose photos have appeared in several major publications including the New York Times Magazine.