On Friday, March 9 at 7pm, the Pulitzer Prize-winning team of Dale Maharidge (Columbia University School of Journalism) and Michael Williamson (The Washington Post) will visit Manhattaville College to talk about their phenomenal new book, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (University of California Press, 2011).

Maharidge, a journalist, and Williamson, a reknowned photographer, began their collaborative partnership when they met while on the staff at the Sacramento Bee. Their first book together, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, is a seminal look at the underside of American prosperity. The book inspired Bruce Springsteen, who eventually wrote an afterword to the reprint of the book, to pen two songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad: "The New Timer" and "Youngstown".

In 1990, Maharidge and Williamson received the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for And Their Children After Them, a book that re-visits three Alabama tenant share-cropping families fifty years after they became the subjects of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. You can read the original New York Times review of And Their Children After Them here.

Springsteen penned an introduction to Someplace Like America, which you can read excerpted with evocative photographs from Michael Williamson at this link from The Washington Post. 

Please join us at 7pm in the Berman Student Center Theater for this rare opportunity to hear Maharidge and Williamson read from their new book, discuss their relationship with Bruce Springsteen, and take questions on their more than 30-year collaborative parternship covering the effects of the economy on working Americans.