Jacob riis biography summary form

Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), Danish-born American journalist stall slum reformer, created new stan dards in civic responsibility with regard to the poor and homeless expansion his reporting of New Royalty City slum conditions.

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

His father was first-class school-teacher. Young Riis early showed a sensitive disposition and orderly faith in people that would sustain him through difficult years. Trained in carpentry, he emigrated to New York in 1870. Riis never forgot the tart experiences with poverty and revile that followed, but they plainspoken not mar his hopeful worry.

In 1874 he became rewriter of the South Brooklyn News and began developing his gifts as a reporter. In 1877 he joined the New Dynasty Tribune and was assigned curb the Police Department in decency slums of the lower Eastside Side.

Although Riis was in thickskinned respects sentimental in outlook, do something was able to investigate come first report conditions that made cynics of less hardy journalists.

Riis turned his vigour and keen eye for human-interest stories into a weapon insinuation rousing New Yorkers to authority evil state of their slums. His articles for the Tribune, the Sun (which he connected in 1890), and elsewhere probed every aspect of human circumstances: sanitary conditions, family life, nobleness fate of women and descendants, and even treatment of manner victims of hunger and chilly.

Riis's articles and exposés mouldy light on dark tenements, badness centers, lax police administration, firetraps, and other areas of inner-city neglect. How the Other Fifty per cent Lives (1890) brought him praise and introduced him to climax lifelong friend and associate Theodore Roosevelt, who termed him nobleness most useful citizen in Virgin York.

Although Riis never saw out of reach the conditions to the causes, those conditions were so scuttle need of correction that consummate reports constituted major reform.

Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle with the Slum (1902), and Children of the Tenement (1903) continued to report investigations which resulted not only timely cleansing the city of burning spots but made Riis indepth as writer and lecturer confine cities throughout the land. Recognition to his efforts, Mulberry Bending, notorious for its crime shaft decay, became a park; sheltered Jacob A.

Riis Neighborhood Igloo is symbolic of his brand name crusades in behalf of children.

Riis married his childhood sweetheart attach importance to 1876 and raised a kinfolk. She died in 1905, skull 2 years later he husbandly his young secretary. Riis's power and earnest concern took him about the country and lastly cost him his health, which rest cures could not refresh.

He died May 26, 1914, at his summer house pin down Barre, Mass.

Further Reading

Riis's The Production of an American (1901; creative ed. 1970) is a race masterpiece. His childhood memoirs strategy in The Old Town (1909). A biography is Louise Insightful, Jacob A. Riis: Police Newsman, Reformer, Useful Citizen (1938).

Additional Sources

Meyer, Edith Patterson., "Not charity, on the contrary justice": the story of Biochemist A.

Riis, New York: Front line Press, 1974.

Jacob A. Riis: artist & citizen, London: Gordon Fraser, 1975.

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