"Fucked at Birth's" title is not gratuitous--it comes from a graffito spray-painted inside the gas station on the cover of the book. I set off on a quest to ask a wide range of Americans what the flag on the outside of the service station and the writing inside meant to them. I drove across America, from California to New York City amid the height of the pandemic. Homeless camps in California. The Navajo Nation, BLM in Denver, meat packing towns in Nebraska and Iowa, Youngstown.
Before this I released "Snowden's Box" with Jessica Bruder, about my heretofore secret role in the Edward Snowden leak.
"The Dead Drink First" is my first Audible Original. But it's not a spoken book. It's a podcast about my 18-year-quest to bring my dad's missing WWII buddy home. He was buried near my father at Arlington National Cemetery in 2018. The Dead Drink First is based on dozens of hours of audio I recorded over the years, along with new audio. This podcast is a spinoff of my book "Bringing Mulligan Home/The Long Search for a Lost Marine," which was reissued this year by PublicAffairs with a new 9,000-word section of material. The podcast and book are different experiences for listeners/readers. Kind of like cousins. I hope people enjoy both.
The paperback of "Someplace Like America / Tales from the New Great Depression" came out in 2013, with photographs by Michael S. Williamson. Bruce Springsteen wrote a foreword. This book is about our 30 years of covering workers. We bring the story up to the present grim time for so many millions of Americans. We update the stories of the homeless we found back in the 1980s and found out how they are doing today.
In 1990 I won the non-fiction Pulitzer Prize for a book I did with Michael. "And Their Children After Them" followed the fates of the sharecroppers documented by James Agee and Walker Evans in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." A new edition will be published on the 30th anniversary of the Pulitzer by Seven Stories Press in early 2020, with 7,000 new words of update, and a surprise for readers.
I have several Facebook pages. The author one: Go to Facebook and type in "Dale Dimitro Maharidge." Others: "Someplace Like America: The Book" and "Bringing Mulligan Home." If you are not a Facebook member, you can still view the pages typing in the titles, plus "Facebook", in Google.
Dale Maharidge - Winter 2021
