The Making of an American was published by Macmillan in 1901, and it is one of the great American immigrant autobiographies — the story of how a penniless Danish carpenter became one of the most influential journalists in the country and a personal friend of the President of the United States.
Riis arrived in New York in 1870 at age twenty-one, knowing almost no English and possessing almost no money. His first years in America were a nightmare of poverty: he slept in doorways, ate from garbage, was robbed of what little he had, and came close to dying of exposure and hunger. He worked as a laborer, a carpenter, a salesman, and a failed farmer before finding his vocation as a newspaper reporter — first for a small Brooklyn paper, then for the New York Tribune.
The autobiography is valuable both as personal narrative and as social history. Riis’s account of life among the immigrant poor — the lodging houses, the labor agencies, the sweatshops, the charitable institutions — is as detailed and as devastating as anything in How the Other Half Lives, but here it is firsthand experience rather than journalism. He was the Other Half before he wrote about them.
The book also documents Riis’s relationships with the powerful — particularly Theodore Roosevelt, whose friendship he cultivated during Roosevelt’s time as Police Commissioner of New York and who appears throughout the later chapters as ally, collaborator, and friend.
Collecting The Making of an American
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1901): Cloth binding, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $50–$150
- Without illustrations: less desirable
- Later editions: $10–$25