Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. She lives in Kansas.
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2019 "A deeply humane
memoir that crackles with clarifying insight, Heartland is one of a
growing number of important works - including Matthew Desmond's
Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesville - that together merit their
own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's
postindustrial decline. . . . With deft primers on the Homestead
Act, the farming crisis of the '80s, and Reaganomics, Smarsh shows
how the false promise of the 'American dream' was used to subjugate
the poor. It's a powerful mantra."
--New York Times Book Review "Heartland is [Smarsh's] map of home,
drawn with loving hands and tender words. This is the nation's
class divide brought into sharp relief through personal history ...
Heartland is a thoughtful, big-hearted tale ... Heartland is a
welcome interruption in the national silence that hangs over the
lives of the poor and a repudiation of the culture of shame that
swamps people who deserve better."
--Washington Post "Something about Sarah Smarsh's writing makes you
light up inside. You feel her joy and grief, fury and hope ... That
is how I felt reading Smarsh's book: as if the world could wait
until I got to the end. Smarsh's book belongs with Ta-Nehisi
Coates' Between the World and Me and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy
as a volume with a transformative vision--a message for a blind and
uncaring America, which needs to wake up. Hopefully we will not
just open our eyes. Hopefully we will also change.
--The American Conservative "Smart, nuanced and atmospheric ...
Heartland deepens our understanding of the crushing ways in which
class shapes possibility in this country. It's an unsentimental
tribute to the working-class people Smarsh knows -- the farmers,
office clerks, trash collectors, waitresses -- whose labor is often
invisible or disdained."
--NPR Books "In her sharply-observed, big-hearted memoir,
Heartland, Smarsh chronicles the human toll of inequality, her own
childhood a case study ... what this book offers is a tour through
the messy and changed reality of the American dream, and a love
letter to the unruly but still beautiful place she called
home."
--Boston Globe "Sarah Smarsh's intelligent, affecting memoir ...
[asks]: What's the matter with the American dream? ...
Understanding widening wealth inequality in our nation is a project
with which anyone who has a conscience should be concerned -- a
robust, expansive middle class is vital to democracy, and arguably
to the functioning of our particular Constitution. Smarsh's
Heartland is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of
working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with
readers of all classes."
--San Francisco Chronicle "Combining heartfelt memoir with
eye-opening social commentary, Smarsh braids together the stories
of four generations of her rural red-state family."
--People "In a memoir written with loving candor, the daughter of
generations of serially impoverished Kansas wheat farmers and
working-poor single mothers chronicles a family's unshakeable
belief in the American dream and explains why it couldn't help but
fail them."
--Ms. Magazine "Heartland recounts five generations of Smarsh
exploits in the farmlands of Kansas, from pioneer days to the Obama
era, when the author finally breaks into the middle class. The book
is a personal, decades-long story of America's coordinated assault
on its underclass ... There is rich soil in America's flyover
states, and if we follow Smarsh's path, we will find families like
mine and the author's, full of sensible, resilient women who may be
disenfranchised, but who are also uniquely poised and equipped to
aid in the revolution, and in our collective liberation."
--L.A. Times "Smarsh's book, a soul-baring meditation on poverty
and class in America, tells the stories of her family's wounded
women, their farming men and her own wrenching choice to snap the
three-generation cycle of teenage motherhood into which she was
born ... Her moving memoir can be seen as the female, Great Plains
flip side to 2016's best-selling Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance: a
loving yet unflinching look at the marginalized people who grow
America's food, build its houses and airplanes but never seem to
share fully in its prosperity."
--New York Post "The subtitle of Sarah Smarsh's "Heartland" is "A
Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on
Earth." Her timing is impeccable, given the country's growing
divide around class. Her goal is nothing less than disputing the
belief that some people -- specifically "white trash" -- are just
meant to be, that the bad choices they make regarding sex or
alcohol or jobs or education are, well, practically in their DNA
and not the result of cultural forces ... This is a provocative,
well-researched book for our times."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Smarsh seamlessly interweaves [her
family's] tales with her own experiences and the political
happenings of the day to tell a story that feels complete, honest
and often poetic ... Heartland shines brightest in moments like
these, when colorful anecdotes bring childhood memories vividly to
life. Beyond their entertainment value, these stories flesh out
nuanced characters in complex situations, dispelling stereotypes
about the working class. Smarsh bookends these engaging tales with
social commentary and historical information ... Heartland draws
its strength from its storytelling and authority from its context
and commentary."
--Texas Observer "Part memories, part economic analysis, part
sociological treatise, "Heartland" ties together various threads of
American society of the last 40 years ... Smarsh's book is
persuasive not only for the facts she marshals, but also because of
the way she expresses [them]. "
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch "An important, timely work that details a
family, a landscape, and a country that has changed dramatically
since Smarsh's birth in 1980. Heartland puts a very human face on
the issue of economic inequality while also serving as an
outstretched hand of sorts across the economic divide, seeking to
connect readers from all economic backgrounds through a shared
American story."
--Iowa City Gazette "Heartland is an important book for this moment
... Smarsh emerges as a writer, most potently, in her vivid
encounters with the ironies of working-class life -- her
reflections on what it means to live poor can turn startlingly
poetic."
--EntertainmentWeekly.com "A poignant look at growing up in a town
30 miles from the nearest city; learning the value and satisfaction
of hard, blue-collar work, and then learning that the rest of the
country see that work as something to be pitied; watching her young
mother's frustration with living at the "dangerous crossroads of
gender and poverty" and understanding that such a fate might be
hers, too. This idea is the thread that Smarsh so gracefully weaves
throughout the narrative; she addresses the hypothetical child she
might or might not eventually have and in doing so addresses all
that the next generation Middle Americans living in poverty will
face."
--Buzzfeed "You might have read Sarah Smarsh's viral New York Times
op-ed, which deconstructed the myth of the "aggrieved laborer:
male, Caucasian, conservative, racist, sexist" with reference to
the experiences and opinions of her working-class father. In this
memoir, she fully explores the impact of poverty on her
family."
--Elle.com "The difficulty of transcending poverty is the message
behind this personal history of growing up in the dusty farmlands
of Kansas, where "nothing was more painful ... than true things
being denied" ... The takeaway? The working poor don't need our
pity; they need to be heard above the din of cliché and without
so-called expert interpretation. Smarsh's family are expert enough
to correct any misunderstandings about their lives."
--Oprah.com "Startlingly vivid ... an absorbing, important work in
a country that needs to know more about itself."
--Christian Science Monitor "Smarsh's family history, tracing
generations of teen mothers and Kansas farmer-laborers, forsakes
detailed analysis of Trumpland poverty in favor of a first-person
perspective colored by a sophisticated (if general) understanding
of structural inequality. But most importantly, her project is shot
through with compassion and pride for the screwed-over working
class, even while narrating her emergence from it, diving into
college instead of motherhood."
--Vulture "Sarah Smarsh looks at class divides in the United States
while sharing her own story of growing up in poverty before
ultimately becoming a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government. Her memoir doesn't just focus on her own story; it also
examines how multiple generations of her family were affected by
economic policies and systems."
--Bustle "If you're working towards a deeper understanding of our
ruptured country, then Sarah Smarsh's memoir and examination of
poverty in the American heartland is an essential read. Smarsh
chronicles her childhood on the poverty line in Kansas in the '80s
and '90s, and the marginalization of people based on their income.
When did earning less mean a person was worth less?"
--Refinery29 "Searing, timely and blazingly eloquent, Heartland
challenges readers to look beyond tired stereotypes of the rural
Midwest and is a testament to the value (on many levels) of
"flyover country.""
--Shelf Awareness "Blending memoir and reportage, a devastating and
smart examination of class and the working poor in America,
particularly the rural working poor. An excellent portrait of an
often overlooked group."
--BookRiot.com "Candid and courageous ... Smarsh's raw and intimate
narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that has 'failed
its children.'"
--Publishers Weekly, starred review
""By interweaving memoir, history, and social commentary, this book
serves as a countervailing voice to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy,
which blamed individual choices, rather than sociological
circumstances, for any one person ending up in poverty. Smarsh
believes the American Dream is a myth, noting that success is more
dependent on where you were born and to whom ... Will appeal to
readers who enjoy memoirs and to sociologists. While Smarsh ends on
a hopeful note, she offers a searing indictment of how the poor are
viewed and treated in this country."
--Library Journal
"[A] powerful message of class bias ... A potent social and
economic message [is] embedded within an affecting memoir."
--Kirkus, 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
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