"This is a book about Chicago. It is also, and for that very reason, a book about every other American city which has lived long enough and grown large enough to experience the transformation of neighborhoods and the contact of cultures and the tension between different types of individual and community behavior. . . . Here is a type of sociological investigation which is equally marked by human interest and scientific method."—Christian Century

Harvey Warren Zorbaugh (1896-1965) was professor of educational sociology at New York University. He recieved his PhD at the University of Chicago under Robert E. Park. The Gold Coast and the Slum, a book based on his PhD thesis, became a classic work of sociology.