Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

John Freeman’s introduction to Tales of Two Americas opens in the city of Sacramento, California, and lays the groundwork for a meditation on poverty in the contemporary United States. Homeless men asking for money approach the editor. He provides it and talks with each man before continuing his walk. In his recent travels around the country, Freeman has encountered similar scenarios. To ignore such pleas for help is “to deny our mutual humanity in order to live our lives” (ix). Further, we live in a country that is broken and demands repair.

Poverty is widespread, impacting both urban centers and rural America, with the top 10 percent of the country’s population earning nine times more than the other 90 percent. Financial inequality in nothing new in the United States and is the direct result of years of bad public policy and historically rooted structural inequality. This inequality is at the heart of the country’s foundation and America’s exploitation of the enslaved. Freeman thusly calls for “a new framework for writing about inequality” that “accounts for what it feels like to live in this America” (xii). Tales of Two Americas fills this need. The editor previews how some of the pieces in the anthology speak to the problem of structural inequality and destroy the “myth” of Horatio Alger, a late-19th-century Social Darwinist author who published stories about poor characters who overcome obstacles to become wealthy.