author
Hutchins Hapgood
1869–1944
A sharp-eyed journalist and memoirist, he wrote vividly about city life, radical politics, and the bohemian world taking shape in turn-of-the-century America. His work brought readers close to people and subcultures that mainstream writing often ignored.
5 Audiobooks
Paul Jones
by Hutchins Hapgood
The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York
by Hutchins Hapgood
The Story of a Lover
by Hutchins Hapgood
The Autobiography of a Thief
by Hutchins Hapgood
An Anarchist Woman
by Hutchins Hapgood
About the author
Born in Chicago in 1869 and raised in Alton, Illinois, he studied at the University of Michigan before graduating from Harvard in 1892. He went on to work as a journalist and critic in Chicago and New York, building a reputation for firsthand, sympathetic writing about laborers, immigrants, anarchists, and other outsiders.
He is especially remembered for books such as The Spirit of the Ghetto and The Autobiography of a Thief, along with memoirs that drew on his own life in journalism and bohemian circles. His writing mixed reporting, social observation, and personal reflection in a way that helped document the restless urban culture of the early 1900s.
Hapgood was married to writer Neith Boyce, and together they were part of the artistic and intellectual life of Greenwich Village. He died in 1944, leaving behind work that still stands out for its curiosity, candor, and interest in people living at the edges of respectable society.