Jacob A. Riis
Reports, including
How the Other Half Lives
(1890), of Danish-born American journalist and reformer Jacob August Riis on living conditions in city slums led to improvements in housing and education.
This Christian helped the impoverished in city of New York; much of his writing focused on those needy. In his youth in Denmark, he read Charles Dickens and James Fennimore Cooper; his works exhibit the story-telling skills, acquired under the tutelage of many English-speaking writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Riis
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutterhammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without asmuch as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and firstblow it will split in two, and I know it was not that lastblow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Jacob A. Riis