The Efficiency Expert by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fiction

Jimmy Torrance graduated from college without a hope -- he'd spent his hours at the university learning how to box, how to swim, how the hit a baseball and lead a football team. He set out for Chicago with all the enthusiastic eagerness oif a man who knows in his heart of heart, that he's on the winning team. But Chicago wasn't Ivy-league college football, a there was no team to captain: What Jimmyu found in Chicago was a tough life in a tough place at a miserable wage. He found the decency of folks any ordinary fellow would have branded criminals, and he found the criminality of upstanding citizens who surrounded him. He found a whore with a heart of gold, and a safe-cracker who was also a man a body could rely on. And most important of all, in that freakish, frightful burg, Jimmy found a thing called love. . . .