"In the days of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs of the 1960s, Michael Harrington was described as "the man who discovered poverty." On the eve of the millenium, Time magazine listed his 1962 book The Other America as one of the ten most important nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. Yet, as Maurice Isserman's new biography reveals, Harrington was never satisfied with the role of "social critic," however influential.

His life's ambition was nothing less than creating a powerful and pragmatic "left-wing of the possible" in the United States, a democratic socialist movement akin to those in power in much of western Europe, that he hoped could help tug the Center to the Left, and the Left to the Center in American politics.".

"In The Other American, Isserman tells for the first time Harrington's true story. He follows Michael's life from his birth in 1928 in St. Louis, where he was the only son of a securely middle-class and devoutly religious Irish-Catholic family, through his education at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, and then on to New York City's Greenwich Village in 1950.

In the midst of the Korean War and at the height of the McCarthy era, Harrington took a highly unusual step toward the margins of American political and cultural life, enlisting first in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, and then in the battered remnants of the socialist movement led by Norman Thomas.

Isserman's biography shows how Harrington spent much of the decade that followed as an itinerant radical organizer, honing his skills as a speaker and writer, working with black activists like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the earliest days of the modern civil rights movement, and becoming familiar with those "invisible Americans" whose lives he would chronicle in The Other America.".

"The Other American is a history of the American left during the past half-century. Harrington encountered, befriended, and fought with a spectacular array of American characters, from Norman Thomas to Dylan Thomas, Irving Howe to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buchley to Norman Mailer, and many, many others."--BOOK JACKET.