the Autobiography, besides an exhaustive analysis of his own intuitions, beliefs, courses of reasoning, emotions, penchants, and instincts, the author merely outlined his manner of life and adventures, particularly while impersonating a female. In The Female-Impersonators, he undertook little more, in description of Underworld life, than to detail the experiences of cultured ultra-androgynes. In the Riddle of the Underworld, the author of the Trilogy—
Gives the history of New York's white-light and red-light districts since the beginning of the nineteenth century; analyzes the causes of vice and crime on the basis of his intimate mingling with the Underworlders ; shows why a "vicious tenth" exists in all cities, and how the Overworld (which constitutes nine-tenths of the population of Christian lands) should regulate the former.
Depicts life in New York's poorest immigrant quarters and tenements—in its reality because he saw it as an insider, the denizens of the slums and the Underworld shamefacedly veiling the fundamental facts of their existence from charity and sociological investigators, but admitting the author to everything because he mingled with them as a non-intellectual and fairie.
Depicts life in the lowest type of slum lodging-house, once the author's home, and the night life in general of the Bowery at the height of the latter's vogue as New York's principal red-light street, the author at the time being one of its "filles-de-joie."
