<p>Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.</p><p>Jacob Riis&rsquo;s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais&rsquo;s Pantagruel: &ldquo;One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.&rdquo; An anatomy of New York City&rsquo;s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of &ldquo;the other half,&rdquo; who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.</p><p>Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of <i>How the Other Half Lives</i> reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis&rsquo;s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.</p>