Who wrote The Other America?

• A. Noam Chomsky
• B. Sargent Shriver
• C. Martin Luther King Jr.
• D. Michael Harrington

Answer: (D)

The idea behind this question is to know who wrote a pivotal book that exposed widespread poverty in the United States and helped spark national policy discussions in the early 1960s. Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, published in 1962, in which he used careful reporting and social analysis to show that poverty persisted even as the country grew wealthier. His portrait of American life—urban slums, isolated communities, and real households struggling to get by—made poverty a visible, national issue and provided intellectual momentum for the War on Poverty and other Great Society reforms. The other figures were influential in their own right—Chomsky as a linguist and critic, Shriver as a key organizer of social programs, King as a civil rights leader—but none of them authored this particular book.