In 1962, a 33-year-old freelance writer who had little institutional or academic standing published a book widely credited with helping inspire the creation of Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, and ...

Harrington came slowly to write about poverty. By the time he did, he was himself on the social margins, albeit by choice. He had grown up the only child of a middle-class family in St. Louis ...

Judging from a book to be published by Macmillan in February, it will not be a gentle hand. In a searing indictment of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, ...

Margaret Talbot writes about “Poverty, by America,” a new book by Matthew Desmond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Evicted.” ...

On January 19, 1963, the New Yorker published a 13,000-word essay, “Our Invisible Poor,” the longest book review the magazine had ever run. No piece of prose did more to make plain the ...

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson declaring what would come to be known as the War on Poverty. In his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson outlined a number ...

Social-policy elites and the media jumped onto the bandwagon, predicting that the war would finally overcome the “structural poverty” imposed by the existing economic order. That understanding of the ...

Sixty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared “an unconditional war on poverty.” Using policies and programs as weapons, Johnson focused heavily on health coverage and “human capital.” ...

Mayor of Saint Paul, Minn. During his 1964 State of the Union address, former President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty. While this national effort did reduce poverty ...