Evicted

“Astonishing… Desmond has set a new standard for reporting on poverty.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times Book Review“After reading Evicted, you’ll realize you cannot have a serious conversation about poverty without talking about housing… . The book is that good, and it’s that unignorable.”—Jennifer Senior, New York Times“Inside my copy of his book, Mr. Desmond scribbled a note: ‘home = life.’ Too many in Washington don’t understand that. We need a government that will partner with communities, from Appalachia to the suburbs to downtown Cleveland, to make hard work pay off for all these overlooked Americans.”—Senator Sherrod Brown, Wall Street Journal“My God, what [Evicted] lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Difficult Women“Written with the vividness of a novel, [Evicted] offers a dark mirror of middle-class America’s obsession with real estate, laying bare the workings of the low end of the market, where evictions have become just another part of an often lucrative business model.”—Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times“In spare and penetrating prose … Desmond has made it impossible to consider poverty without grappling with the role of housing. This pick [as best book of 2016] was not close.”—Carlos Lozada, Washington Post“An essential piece of reportage about poverty and profit in urban America.”—Geoff Dyer, The Guardian“It doesn’t happen every week (or every month, or even year), but every once in a while a book comes along that changes the national conversation… . Evicted looks to be one of those books.”—Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review“Should be required reading in an election year, or any other.”—Entertainment Weekly“Powerful, monstrously effective … The power of this book abides in the indelible impression left by its stories.”—Jill Leovy, The American Scholar“Gripping and important … [Desmond’s] portraits are vivid and unsettling.”—Jason DeParle, New York Review of Books“An exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched exploration of life on the margins, providing a voice to people who have been shamefully ignored—or, worse, demonized—by opinion makers over the course of decades.”—The Boston Globe“[An] impressive work of scholarship … As Mr. Desmond points out, eviction has been neglected by urban sociologists, so his account fills a gap. His methodology is scrupulous.”—Wall Street Journal

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50 as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”