On September 18, 1889, the doors of Hull-House, a decayed mansion in Chicago's West Side slums, opened for the first time, and one of the great social movements in modern America was launched. Twenty Years at Hull-House is Jane Addams's account of the famed settlement house she founded and of the principles of social justice that inspired her. Addams tells the real stories of the people fictionalized in the novels of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, bringing to life newly arrived immigrants who were forced to live on the margin of society, working intolerable hours for little pay and crowded into slums teeming with disease, crime, and vice. She describes her decision to establish Hull-House as a refuge and chronicles its development into a vibrant community center, providing not only social services but social evenings, ethnic celebrations, and classes that offered the best of American culture and values to an alien and despised population.

As Ruth Sidel writes in her Introduction, Twenty Years at Hull-House dramaticizes a lesson that every generation has to learn anew: the essential place of education and culture at every level of society to ensure the continuation of American democracy.