Suggestions for a course called Reading Poverty: Literature and Service
Compiled by Debby Rosenthal, John Carroll University
Book-length
Ann Petrey, The Street
Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Helena Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Jane Adams, 20 Years at Hull House
Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle
Mary Childer, Welfare Brat
Louisa May Alcott, Work
Pietro Di Donato, Christ in Concrete
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Carolyn Chute, Beans of Egypt, Maine
Edith Wharton, Summer or Ethan Frome
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Richard Wright, Native Son
Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers
Tomas Rivera, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Sapphire, Push (basis of the movie Precious)
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven or Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian
Agnes Smedley, Daughter of the Earth
Edwidge Dandicat, The Farming of Bones
Tillie Olson, Yonnandio
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
stories
Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case”
Stories by Tilly Olson
Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron Mills”
Mary Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun,” “A Church Mouse”
Mary Dodge, “Sunday Afternoon in a Poor House”
Meridel Le Sueur, “Women Are Hungry,” “Annunciation”
Poetry
Gwendolyn Brooks
Philip Levine
Visual representations of the poor
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Shelby Lee Adam, Appalachian Lives
SSAWW 