Titles

Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town

Dale Maharidge
Photographs by Michael Williamson
Free Press / Simon & Schuster
September 2005
ISBN: 074325564X

Over the past 15 years, the all-white, largely German-Lutheran population of Denison, Iowa, has given way to a sizable Latino population, which has been drawn to the small town by the jobs most of the local white youths have turned down: working in the town's packing plants, where as many as 9,400 hogs are butchered each day. It is this demographic shift—with its attendant political battles, business woes and ordinary triumphs and defeats—that the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo of Maharidge and Williamson (And Their Children After Them, etc.) document in their latest photo-and-reportage book.

Denison, Iowa, population 7000, is a hardworking community fueled by grit, energy, and dreams of its distinctive inhabitants. Its motto, “It’s a wonderful life,” is immortalized on the water tower overlooking its legendary cornfields. But all is not as it seems in Small Town America.

A Winesberg, Ohio for the twenty-first century, Denison, Iowa reveals the unexpected layers behind the apple-pie exterior of America’s heartland.

Author Bio

Dale Maharidge spent fifteen years as a newspaperman, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Sacramento Bee, and others. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times op-ed page, among others. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.

Most of Maharidge’s books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them (1989), won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Other books include Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990); The Last Great American Hobo (1993); and The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism & the Nation’s Future (1996, 1999); and Homeland (2004).