I read it, gripped by Barbara’s remarkable account of another America, of her time working as a waitress, maid, and Walmart sales clerk among other poor-paying jobs, and returned it to Sara saying, as she reminded me recently, that I thought it would prove “a classic.” And whatever else I may have been wrong about in these years, I certainly wasn’t wrong about that. The head of the publishing house, my friend Sara Bershtel, handed it to me and asked me to tell her what I thought.

Just one small memory: as the last century ended, I was working as an editor at a remarkable publishing house, Metropolitan Books, when the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed arrived on our doorstep. She wrote for TomDispatch for years and, in 2011, I posted this epilogue to the 10th anniversary edition of her famed book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by which time it had already sold almost two million copies. As I’m sure most of you know by now, thanks to a wave of coverage - ranging from a New York Times obituary to a moving piece by Deirdre English, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine - Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1st at 81. It’s with both sadness and pleasure that I post this evening’s Best of TomDispatch piece.

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