author
Harry Best
1880–1971
A lawyer and social researcher, he wrote wide-ranging studies on deaf education, crime, labor, and the Soviet state. His books are remembered for their careful gathering of facts and their interest in how social institutions shape everyday life.
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About the author
Born in Millersburg, Kentucky, in 1880, Harry Best built an unusually varied career as a teacher, lawyer, and nonfiction writer. Records of his publications show a long working life that stretched from early studies of the garment industry and the position of deaf people in society to later books on crime, criminal law, and the Soviet state.
Best is especially noted for major works on deafness, including The Deaf and Deafness and the Deaf in the United States. Those books aimed to document the lives, education, and social standing of deaf Americans in detail, and they are still preserved in major digital and library collections.
His bibliography suggests a writer drawn to large social questions and willing to tackle them at book length. Rather than writing fiction or personal memoir, he focused on research-heavy studies that tried to explain how laws, schools, labor systems, and public policy affected people's lives.