By 1960 over forty million Americans—22 percent of the population—lived a very different life, below the poverty line.11 They remained largely on the margins of the nation’s economy, political landscape, and wider public consciousness, until the publication of two books—economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society in 1958 and sociologist Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962—helped to scandalize the extent of America’s “poverty amidst plenty.”
