UI Press | James Weber Linn Introduction by Anne Firor Scott

Jane Addams

A Biography

One of the finest--and most complete--biographies of Jane Addams ever written

Jane Addams is most widely remembered as a founder of Hull House, but her social vision extended far beyond Chicago's Halsted Street. The first real adventurer in the unexplored territory of social amelioration in America, Addams worked tirelessly on behalf of a multitude of social causes, including industrial and educational reform, drug laws, sanitation, disaster relief, and food purity. In 1931 she won the Nobel Prize for Peace, a tribute to the decades of energy and eloquence she devoted to eradicating intolerance and elevating human life to a more humane standard.

James Weber Linn's life of this forceful public figure offers a rare glimpse of the private Addams, from her childhood and schooling through her first efforts in public service and her rise to a position of national influence. Linn's biography is based on Addams's personal papers, which she turned over to him before she died: files of her manuscripts, published and unpublished, along with all of her letters and papers, from her first valentine to her last speech. Out of this treasure trove, in combination with Addams's substantial published works, he has written a unique life of his aunt, beautifully illuminating her private reflections and inner strength as well as her formidable public persona.

"Fascinating, important, and readable."--Booklist

"No one of those myriad volumes which will inevitably be written will be simpler, more tender, than this life written by her nephew, James Weber Linn. . . . [In] its honest lack of sentimentality, its painstaking care of detail, its setting down in complete frankness its facts, [it] is a rare one."--Chicago Tribune

James Weber Linn was the nephew of Jane Addams. Anne Firor Scott, professor emerita of history at Duke University, is the author of Making the Invisible Woman Visible and other books.

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