Dale Maharidge
is Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He began his journalism career 25 years ago, working at newspapers in Ohio and California. His first job was at The Gazette in Medina, Ohio. He also worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a feature writer before spending a decade at the Sacramento Bee (CA), where was a special projects reporter, focusing on social issues. His assignments took him to El Salvador, the Philippines and around the United States. Maharidge has published five books, three of them with photographer Michael Williamson. In 1990, the two shared the non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for
And Their Children After Them. Other books include:
Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985);
Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990);
The Last Great American Hobo (1993). His most recent book,
The Coming White Minority: California's Multiculturalism and the Nation's Future (1996/1999), chronicles events leading up to whites falling below half of California's population. He has won numerous journalism awards, the most recent being a 2001 Social Justice Journalism Award from Hunter College, for a George Magazine story on child hunger in America, tied to the 2000 presidential election. In 1994, the Pope Foundation gave him a $15,000 mid-career achievement grant. Maharidge has written for George Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mother Jones, the New York Times op/ed page, others. Maharidge attended Cleveland State University majoring in English and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1987-88.
Dale Maharidge
, who won a Pulitzer for his 1989 book And Their Children After Them, about rural poverty, never found it difficult to see the world from the bottom up. Since taking his first journalism job at The Gazette of Medina in Cleveland, his hometown, in 1977, Maharidge has been referred to by editors, somewhat derisively, he says, as the “bum writer.” He was the son of a steelworker who had a side business at home, grinding cutting tools for industrial use. “I literally grew up breathing steel dust,” says Maharidge. His new book,
Homeland, due out July 4, is about an undercurrent of working- class — really working-poor — anger that Maharidge says predates 9/11. The book highlights the kinds of stories the press misses because of this “lens” problem Shipler talks about.
Dale Maharidge, who won a Pulitzer for his 1989 book And Their Children After Them, about rural poverty, never found it difficult to see the world from the bottom up. Since taking his first journalism job at The Gazette of Medina in Cleveland, his hometown, in 1977, Maharidge has been referred to by editors, somewhat derisively, he says, as the "bum writer." He was the son of a steelworker who had a side business at home, grinding cutting tools for industrial use. "I literally grew up breathing steel dust," says Maharidge.
