twenty years at hull house

host of others—hut they were responsible for a remarkable number of them, and many others were inspired by the spirit of HulhHouse. The result was a basic transformation of American society, a transformation so basic that many people today are unaware that it took place, unable to conceive of a time when the nation provided so few safe' guards for ordinary men and women. The idea for Twenty Years at Hull-House, in which Addams de' scribed the outcome of their experiment and explored its meaning, came to her in 1905, when she was fortyTour years old. In the preface she says that she wrote the book, first, to forestall two biographies of herself which, she says, "made life in a Settlement all too smooth and charming." The second, larger purpose was, she says, to explain the Settlement movement: "Because Settlements have multiplied so easily in the United States I hoped that a simple statement of an earliereffort, including the stress and storm, might be of value in their interpretation and possibly clear them of a certain charge of superficiality." Addams was already an experienced writer. She was constantly producing articles and speeches and had already combined a number of them into a successful book: Democracy and Social Ethics ( 1902). (Two others were to appear during the five years Addams took to write Twenty Years at Hull-House: Newer Ideals of Peace [1907] and The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets [1909].) Addams set about writing Twenty Years at Hull-House in the same way as her other books, by writing and publishing short pieces which could later be knitted into a sustained book. The earliest of these pieces, "Fifteen Years at Hull-House," was published early in 1906 in the Ladies Home Journal; other articles that were to be incorporated into the book followed in the same magazine and in the American Magazine and McClure's Magazine. The book was very successful when it was published in 1910. The reviews were favorable, in some cases worshipful, and the book went through six printings in its first year. It continued to sell well throughout Addamss lifetime. An inexpensive paperback edition was published in 1961 and continues to sell well, to a general audience as well as to academics. Twenty Years at Hull-House, then, has found the readership that Addams hoped would be interested in a daring and controversial social experiment and the personality that created it. But few who have written about the book seem to have noticed what an unusual book it is. Henry Steele Commager, who wrote the foreword to the 1961 paper-