Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Sarah Smarsh proudly considers herself a "daughter of the working class." In fact, the Kansas-based author is a fifth-generation ...

Sarah Smarsh grew up poor. But not in the itinerant “Grapes of Wrath” or Dickensian orphan versions of poor. This was the grounded, farm-family variety that exemplified a large slice of the Midwest.

To topple the walls that divide Americans, we must first understand them. In the essays of “Bone of the Bone,” journalist Sarah Smarsh combines memoir with political analysis and a critique of ...

The spare, hand-to-mouth world in which Sarah Smarsh grew up in rural Kansas held little room for emotion, or at least emotional display. So, her memory has held tight to the times when she and her ...

When she was a child, Sarah Smarsh’s dad started foaming at the mouth in the emergency room. To make ends meet, he had taken a second job transporting industrial chemicals in a truck that, it turns ...

It has been a year since the publication of “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” (Scribner) by Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas native who detailed a childhood ...

Sarah Smarsh proudly considers herself a “daughter of the working class.” In fact, the Kansas-based author is a fifth-generation farm girl whose impoverished mother was a mere 17 when discovering her ...