Within a few years, President Lyndon B Johnson would begin rolling out his Great Society agenda to combat the destitution Harrington wrote about.Ģ. Harrington explored factories, farms, and mountain shacks to show how so many were left behind. The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harringtonįirst published in 1962, this book took a broad, structural view of how poverty persisted in the US despite the boom years after the second world war which launched many into a growing middle class. Taken together, they illustrate an exceptionally grim truth about US society.ġ. This list is a blend of the two, the best of each sort of story. These take the focus off the individual and, at their best, explain the larger forces that can often shape our lives, whether we know it or not. The other type, equally important, takes a broad view and explains the history of American poverty as a series of policy and political choices. To write it, I returned home to my small, poor town in the Arkansas Ozarks after many years of living in big cities on the east coast to find my childhood best friend: through our reconnection, I explored the ways that the different places we lived marked our adult lives. My own book, The Forgotten Girls, follows in this tradition. Novels and narrative nonfiction books often take a personal, sometimes painfully vivid and honest portrayal of a family or individual in a way that can personalise the potentially abstract issue for readers. The books about poverty that resonate most for me come in two forms.

Mcghee the sum of us