Ehrenreich received the Sydney Hillman Award for Journalism and a Brill's Content "Honorable Mention" for a chapter of the book that appeared in Harper's in 1999. Responses were largely positive, with The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle all praising Ehrenreich's work. Through the process, Ehrenreich found her self-set rules tested and her eyes widened-and critics were quick to champion her gamble. The point was not so much to become poor as to get a sense of the spectrum of low-wage work that existed-from waitressing to maid work, from feeding the elderly to prowling the aisles of Wal-Mart. Except, of course, Ehrenreich set limits and rules for herself, held onto a car and an ATM card for emergencies, and hopped from locale to locale when the going got tough. It was the "old-fashioned kind of journalism" as she put it, true undercover reportage. Her familial roots may have been decidedly blue-collar, but she was now anything but.Įhrenreich's journey, as chronicled in her book, immediately caught attention. Ehrenreich was comfortably ensconced in the upper-middle-class world of high-brow writing. As she relates in her introduction to the book, the idea of trying out low-wage work in the interest of investigative reportage came up during a lunch with the editor of Harper’s. Barbara Ehrenreich was already a highly respected figure in the world of journalism before she penned Nickel and Dimed.
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