Hutchins Hapgood was a social critic best known for his reportage of the urban underworld and his vital role in establishing Greenwich Village as the center of American radicalism. During his most prolific period, from 1898 to 1914, Hapgood wrote both journalistic sketches and book-length studies on a variety of unorthodox human subjects, including anarchists, socialists, labor unionists, immigrants, bohemians, free-love advocates, prostitutes, and thieves. His writings challenged evangelical moral reform, anti-immigrant rhetoric, the prison system, and monogamy, among many other social issues. Hapgood was ardently opposed to doctrinaire reformist movements, however--his fascination with the underworld did not arise from sentimental pity or outrage, but rather from a deep appreciation of what he describes in his collection of urban journalism Types from City Streets (1910) as "certain moral, intellectual, and temperamental qualities in what are generally called 'low' persons which are admirable and attractive; and these qualities are easily experienced by...