Dale Maharidge

Who is Dale Maharidge?

Dale Maharidge is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist best known for his collaborations with photographer Michael Williamson.

Maharidge and Williamson's book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990. It was conceived as a revisiting of the places and people depicted in Walker Evans's and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Also with Williamson, Maharidge wrote Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, which singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen has credited as an influence for songs such as "Youngstown" and "The New Timer".

Reared in Ohio, Maharidge was a staff writer for The Plain Dealer and the Sacramento Bee. It was while at the Bee that he formed his partnership with Williamson, who was a news photographer for the paper. The pair have traveled and lived among the rural poor as they documented the underside of American prosperity. Maharidge has also contributed to publications including Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

In 2011, he published Someplace Like America: On the Road with Workers, 1980-2010. His latest project is Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War which was published in March 2013.