The poor, Michael Harrington wrote in his book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962, “need a novelist as well as a sociologist if we are to see them. They need an American Dickens to record the smell and texture and quality of their lives.” Harrington, a stalwart of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party of America and a member of the editorial board of the left-wing journal Dissent, was not that novelist. But in his attempt to “describe the faces behind the statistics”, he proved himself to be, if not the Dickens of modern American poverty, then at least its Orwell.
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