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The Outsiders

Exploring the lives of teenagers from different social backgrounds, this novel delves into the complexities of identity, friendship, and the struggle to find a place in the world. more

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S.E. Hinton

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“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep. My father had a master plan. He told me, "My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That's two houses. That son gets his own house, that's three houses . . ." The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed. I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in line who said, "I don't want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!" He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler's attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They'd learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn't help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe . . . But no, there weren't any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality. What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?”

PoorPovertyRichDepressionGreat DepressionBukowskiDirty RealismHam On RyeDishwasher
Book:Ham On Rye
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“It is hard to imagine a more elegant table at which to share a meal. Yet here it sits-never used, never disturbed-accompanied by a single chair. This table harks back to a different era, a better time in the life of Susan's family, when owning this house in this part of Chicago signaled the achievement of middle-class African American respectability. Before the economic anchors of this far South Side neighborhood closed down-the steel yards in the 1960's, the historic Pullman railway car company in the early 1980's, and the mammoth Sherwin-Williams paint factory in 1995-Roseland was a community with decent-paying, stable jobs. It was a good place to raise your kids. As the jobs left, the drugs arrived. 'It got worse, it changed.' Susan says, 'There's too much violence...unnecessary violence at that.' Given what her family has been through, this is more than a bit of an understatement. Susan's brother was shot in broad daylight just one block away. Her great-grandmother has fled to a meager retirement out west. Susan's family would like nothing more than to find a better place to live, safer streets and a home that isn't crumbling around them. Yet despite all its ills, this house is the only thing keeping Susan, Devin, and Lauren off the streets. They have spent the past few months surviving on cash income so low that it adds up to less than $2 per person, per day. With hardly a cent to their names, they have nowhere else to go.”

PovertyEconomicsPolitics Of The United StatesHomelessness In America
Book:$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
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“The results of Shaefer's analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That's about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. What's more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation's landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996-and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half. It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day-poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-dat poor were white.”

PoliticsPovertyEconomicsHomelessness In America
Author:Kathryn Edin
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“The results of Shaefer's analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That's about one out of every twenty-five families with children in America. What's more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation's landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996-and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half. It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day-poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white.”

PovertyHomelessness In America
Author:Kathryn Edin
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“America’s cash welfare program-the main government program that caught people when they fell-was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. …This book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, we argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.”

PovertyWelfare ReformHomelessness In America
Author:Kathryn Edin
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