Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast
In 2016 Matthew Desmond became one of the leading voices on poverty in America with the publication of Evicted, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of eight Milwaukee families dealing with the trauma of being removed from their homes. With Evicted, Desmond joined a select group of writers who have written about poverty with the skill of observant novelists.
Jacob Riis’ 1890 How the Other Half Lives, Jane Addams’ 1910 Twenty Years at Hull House, and James Agee and Walker Evans’ 1941 book about tenant farmers during the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are Evicted’s American predecessors.
In his new book Poverty, By America, Desmond, currently a professor of sociology at Princeton, has sought to further his reach by taking on the subject of poverty throughout the United States. In this ambitious project, he has followed in the footsteps of Michael Harrington in his 1962 study, The Other America.