Awards

• Short-listed for National Book Awards: Nonfiction 2018
• Short-listed for The Kirkus Prize 2018

Overview

Heartland reveals one woman's experience of working-class poverty in America with an eye-opening and topical personal story.

Full Product Details

9781925713633

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Reviews

`[A] powerful message of class bias ... A potent social and economic message [is] embedded within an affecting memoir.' - Kirkus, starred review `Candid and courageous ... Smarsh's raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that has 'failed its children.'' - Publishers Weekly, starred review `You might think that a book about growing up on a poor Kansas farm would qualify as 'sociology,' and Heartland certainly does ... But this book is so much more than even the best sociology. It is poetry - of the wind and snow, the two-lane roads running through the wheat, the summer nights when work-drained families drink and dance under the prairie sky.' - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed `Sarah Smarsh - tough-minded and rough-hewn - draws us into the real lives of her family, barely making it out there on the American plains. There's not a false note. Smarsh, as a writer, is Authentic with a capital A ... This is just what the world needs to hear.' - George Hodgman, author of Bettyville `Sarah Smarsh is one of America's foremost writers on class. Heartland is about an impossible dream for anyone born into poverty - a leap up in class, doubly hard for a woman. Smarsh's journey from a little girl into adulthood in Kansas speaks to tens of thousands of girls now growing up poor in what so many dismiss as 'flyover country.' Heartland offers a fresh and riveting perspective on the middle of the nation all too often told through the prism of men.' - Dale Maharidge, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning And Their Children After Them

Author Information

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. A former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and related media narratives. She lives in Kansas. Heartland is her first book.

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