Michael Harrington in 1988. Credit: Bernard Gotfryd Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-gtfy-01644)

The election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City has momentarily made him the most famous democratic socialist in the country, joining Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (an America contributor) as examples of a kind of political figure that doesn’t often get much traction in American civic life. But they’re neither the first nor the most influential democratic socialists in our nation’s history: Think Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair—and perhaps most of all, the writer and activist Michael Harrington.

Born in 1928 in St. Louis, Mo., Harrington attended St. Louis University High School and the College of the Holy Cross. Though he was an atheist for much of his adult life, Harrington still gave credit to his Jesuit education for some of the strength of his convictions. “Our knowledge was not free floating; it was always consciously related to ethical and religious values,” he later wrote of his high school years. One of his classmates was Thomas Dooley, who later became a famous physician ministering to Vietnamese victims of war in the 1950s; another was John Padberg, S.J., who became a well-known Jesuit priest and historian.

After graduating from Holy Cross, Harrington attended Yale Law School for one year and then earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. He then joined the Catholic Worker in New York City and was an editor on its eponymous newspaper from 1951-1953. David McReynolds, himself later a prominent democratic socialist, politician and activist, recalled meeting Harrington at New York City’s White Horse Tavern at the time. “Spent the evening listening to Mike Harrington tell of his experiences in the Catholic Worker,” he wrote to a friend in 1953, “and realize how terribly superficial my whole life is.” 

In 1953, Harrington became the organizational director of the Workers Defense League and joined the Socialist Party (a somewhat more controversial move in 1953 than it might be today). Harrington never allied himself with communism and was no fan of the Soviet Union, advocating instead for an American socialist movement based on organized labor. He spent much of the decade working as a researcher for the Fund for the Republic and as a community organizer while writing for journals like Commentary, Commonweal and Dissent—including this 1960 article for Commonweal, “The Other America.”

Two years later, Harrington published a short but monumental book on the nation’s hidden poverty that grew out of his reporting, with a title Commonweal’s readers would recognize: The Other America: Poverty in the United States. “The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before,” Harrington wrote. “Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us.”

The book was a critical hit almost immediately, garnering laudatory coverage in numerous journals, including a massive 40-page review in The New Yorker; it has since sold over a million copies and is widely credited with inspiring the nation’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s. “Harrington revealed to his readers that an ‘invisible land’ of the poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty line,” wrote Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman, in a 2012 retrospective on the book for Dissent. “For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums where middle-class visitors seldom ventured.”

Further, Isserman wrote, Harrington did not romanticize the lives of the American poor the way that Jack Kerouac or John Steinbeck had in a previous generation. “The Other America was a book about poor people, but it was not a book written for poor people,” he wrote. “The readers Harrington was speaking to were themselves citizens of the affluent society, whose consciences he sought to stir.”

Among Harrington’s fans were the editors of America. “One may pick a fight with him concerning his use of some national statistics to measure the extent of poverty and deplore his pessimistic view on the possibility of ameliorating the situation of its victims,” wrote Edward F. Jost in a 1962 review of The Other America. “Beyond question, however, Harrington has put his finger on the problem that must trouble the conscience of every American; he has written a compassionate tract that should not be ignored.” 

Harrington was cited in countless articles on poverty in the following years, and many of his 16 books were reviewed favorably. His 1972 book Socialism was reviewed for America by the famous “labor priest,” the Rev. George G. Higgins. When Harrington was awarded an honorary degree by the College of the Holy Cross in 1971, editor in chief Donald R. Campion had his entire speech from that year’s commencement reprinted in The Catholic Mind, a journal of philosophy and religion published by America for many years.

Harrington remained a prolific writer, lecturer and instructor throughout the next few decades—a time of turmoil and frequent political controversies within socialist groups in the United States, due not only to the Vietnam War but to the nation’s turn to neoliberal economics—and briefly considered a run for the presidency in 1980. He was a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982. He also served as a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Queens College in New York City.

Harrington died of cancer on July 31, 1989, in New York. He was survived by his wife Stephanie Gervis Harrington and two children. The year before his death, more than 600 of his colleagues gathered for a tribute in his honor at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Guests included Cesar Chavez and U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. The latter’s words at that event were quoted in Harrington’s obituary in the New York Times: “I see Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount to America. Among veterans in the War on Poverty, no one has been a more loyal ally when the night was darkest.”

Harrington never returned to the faith of his childhood, but remained a fellow traveler with many Catholic activists throughout his career. In his memoir Fragments of the Century, Harrington called himself “a pious apostate, an atheist shocked by the faithlessness of the believers, a fellow traveler of moderate Catholicism who has been out of the church for more than 20 years.”

In a 2010 talk at Sacred Heart University, Isserman quoted an interview with Father Padberg about Harrington in which he asked Father Padberg the following:

I guess the question that still is unanswered for me is how did somebody from an upper middle class, ambitious, staunchly Catholic, St. Louis (a conservative city) family who had had a very good high school and college education, but a pretty conventional one, how did he summon up the imagination to do what he did? Because I think it’s probably imagination more than anything else that would have led him to get involved with the Catholic Worker, and socialism, and to write The Other America. 

“It’s imagination that impelled him,” Father Padberg agreed. “Because I think most people do not lack good will. Most people do not lack intelligence. He certainly lacked neither of them. What he had more than other people was imagination.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Dream,” by Rachel E. Hicks. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

In other news, we still have a few spots left for our pilgrimage to Ireland in April 2026. Led by myself and America editor in chief Sam Sawyer, S.J., the trip, “The Land of Saints & Scholars: A Journey into the Heart & Soul of Ireland,” will be from April 19 to 28, 2026. We promise a lot of spiritual insights and a lot of absolute blarney.

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.