Dale Maharidge

Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the journalism school since 2001; he first taught here in the early 1990s. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and before that he spent fifteen years as a newspaperman, writing for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Sacramento Bee, and others. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times op-ed page, Smithsonian, Slate, The Guardian, among others.

Most Many of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them (1989), won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Other books include Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990); The Last Great American Hobo (1993); The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism & the Nation's Future (1996, 1999); Homeland (2004); Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (2005); Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (2011); and Leapers, (2012); His most recent book is Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War, (2013); a March 2013 release by PublicAffairs. Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (with Jessica Bruder, 2020); Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (2021); and a forthcoming novel, Burn Coast. A podcast, “The Dead Drink First,” (2019) reached number one in all categories on Audible for several weeks.

Maharidge attended Cleveland State University. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Maharidge has held residencies Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies.