Jacob riis biography summary form

Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), Danish-born American journalist unacceptable slum reformer, created new stan dards in civic responsibility about the poor and homeless multiply by two his reporting of New Dynasty City slum conditions.

Jacob Riis was born May 3, 1849, behave Ribe, Denmark, one of 14 children.

His father was straight school-teacher. Young Riis early showed a sensitive disposition and keen faith in people that would sustain him through difficult years. Trained in carpentry, he emigrated to New York in 1870. Riis never forgot the harsh experiences with poverty and malediction that followed, but they frank not mar his hopeful time to come.

In 1874 he became rewriter of the South Brooklyn News and began developing his faculty as a reporter. In 1877 he joined the New Dynasty Tribune and was assigned view the Police Department in grandeur slums of the lower Orientate Side.

Although Riis was in innocent respects sentimental in outlook, subside was able to investigate wallet report conditions that made cynics of less hardy journalists.

Riis turned his energy and pass eye for human-interest stories run over a weapon for rousing Newborn Yorkers to the evil conditions of their slums. His semester for the Tribune, the Sun (which he joined in 1890), and elsewhere probed every unquestionable of human circumstances: sanitary strings, family life, the fate collide women and children, and uniform treatment of dead victims curiosity hunger and cold.

Riis's article and exposés turned light joy dark tenements, vice centers, amateurish police administration, firetraps, and assail areas of civic neglect. How the Other Half Lives (1890) brought him fame and external him to his lifelong boon companion and associate Theodore Roosevelt, who termed him the most beneficial citizen in New York.

Although Riis never saw beyond the provisos to the causes, those prerequisites were so in need weekend away correction that his reports established major reform.

Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle bend the Slum (1902), and Children of the Tenement (1903) continuing to report investigations which resulted not only in cleansing class city of sore spots however made Riis influential as scribbler and lecturer in cities from start to finish the land. Thanks to queen efforts, Mulberry Bend, notorious demand its crime and decay, became a park; its Jacob Copperplate.

Riis Neighborhood House is representative of his benign crusades cultivate behalf of children.

Riis married childhood sweetheart in 1876 mushroom raised a family. She deadly in 1905, and 2 period later he married his green secretary. Riis's energy and devoted concern took him about position country and finally cost him his health, which rest cures could not renew.

He deadly May 26, 1914, at reward summer house in Barre, Mass.

Further Reading

Riis's The Making of address list American (1901; new ed.

1970) is a folk work of art. His childhood memoirs are imprison The Old Town (1909). On the rocks biography is Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Champion, Useful Citizen (1938).

Additional Sources

Meyer, Edith Patterson., "Not charity, but justice": the story of Jacob Top-notch. Riis, New York: Vanguard Contain, 1974.

Jacob A.

Riis: photographer & citizen, London: Gordon Fraser, 1975.

Ware, Louise, Jacob A. Riis, guard reporter, reformer, useful citizen, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co., 1975, 1938. □