Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Finalist, National Book Awards 2018 for Nonfiction

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh book cover
ISBN 9781501133091
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, VQR, NewYorker.com, Harpers.org, The Texas Observer, and many others. She is currently a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. More about this author >

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During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.

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Sarah Smarsh, Nonfiction Finalist, reads from Heartland at 2018 National Book Awards Finalists Reading

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