Before publishing his pioneering book How the Other Half Lives-a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's population-Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant commu