John A. Fitch

John Andrews Fitch (1881–1959) was an American writer, teacher, and pioneering social investigator of the Progressive Era.

He is best known for his contributions to The Pittsburgh Survey, a landmark study of social conditions in an archetypal U.S. industrial city.

He taught at Nebraska's Weeping Water Academy before enrolling at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for graduate studies in political economy.

In the fall of 1907 he joined with his professor, John R. Commons, on a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to begin work with dozens of other progressives on an ambitious sociological study: Paul Kellogg's Pittsburgh Survey, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Beginning in 1917 Fitch taught labor relations as a professor at the New York School of Social Work, where he retired in 1946.