In , writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to lifethrough shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysisthe deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream mediapeople living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In , they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential studybegun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastropheputs a human face on todays grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.