ABSTRACT
Henry George's interest in the problem of poverty increasing in the midst of affluence originated in his early life. In 1855 he had sailed as a ship's boy to Calcutta, a city where the contrast between extremes of wealth and poverty was legendary. His own early manhood was spent around San Francisco, and his concern over economic problems grew in part out of the personal difficulties he experienced there. Progress and Poverty is a detailed exposition of George's theories. Much of it is written in a mode of cool and rational analysis. In fact George's careful, academic arguments occur in a context of burning moral and ethical fervour. Progress and Poverty was a crucial, pioneering expression of that radical critique of America's social and economic life which a new movement in American literature, originating in the 1870s and developing through the 1880s and 1890s, would go on to articulate in imaginative terms.
