Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), the foremost Anglo-Jewish author of his generation, chronicled London's Jewish East End in the last decades of the 19th century. After receiving a BA degree with triple honours from the University of London he devoted himself to journalism and literature, writing sketches, essays and editorials about Jewish immigrants for a number of British and American periodicals, and publishing numerous short stories and several novels on Jewish and non-Jewish issues. Commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America he wrote this novel relating the life and experiences of East European Jewish children in Whitechapel in the early 1880s which was published simultaneously in London and Philadelphia in 1892, bringing him instant international fame. The second part of the novel, Grandchildren of the Ghetto, was later also published separately, and Zangwill went on to publish further "of the Ghetto" titles which included collections of short stories.