Keen On

Like yesterday’s KEEN ON guest, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Dale Maharidge believes that liberals are “equally to blame” for what he calls, in his new collection of essays, America’s Doom Loop. Maharidge, whose Pulitzer prize winning writing about the gutting of the industrial midwest, inspired Springsteen’s iconic 1995 song “Youngstown”, barely recognizes the America of the 2020s. It was a different reality in 1980, he says, arguing that Americans of both left and right have written off the center of the country over the last half century. This is the tragic story of our age and there are few Americans who tell it straighter than Maharidge. For nearly four decades, Dale Maharidge has been one of America's leading chroniclers of poverty. Alongside photographer Michael S. Williamson, his book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990, revisiting the places and people of Depression-era America, depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with