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Journalist and author of the New York Times best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by In America. One of our country's most recognized and original social commentators, author/ journalist Barbara Ehrenreich has been a contributing writer for Time Magazine since 1990. Her articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Ms., Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy, Mirabella, as well as in newspapers throughout the world. Her best-seller Nickel and Dimed has been adapted for the theatre by Joan Holden and is opening in major cities across the United States, including Salt Lake City on March 1-3.

In early 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich posed the following questions to an editor at Harper's Magazine: How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular, were the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? Millions of Americans work full-time, year around, for poverty-level wages; in 1998, Ehrenreich joined them. What ensued is an unprecedented and illuminating work of immersion journalism, captured in its provocative entirety in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America which became a New York Times bestseller. To answer her own questions, Ehrenreich left her Home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted the highest-paying jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-Home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels, discovering quickly that no job is truly 'unskilled,' that even the lowliest occupations take an enormous mental and physical toll, and that one job is not enough - not, that is, if you intend to live indoors. "With all the real life assets I've built up in middle age - bank account, IRA, health insurance, multi room Home - waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to 'experience poverty' or find out how it 'really feels' to be a long-term woe-wage worker," Ehrenreich cautions. "My aim here was much more straightforward and objective - just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day." What she discovered was that, in fact, she could not. Ehrenreich's hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of the working world brilliantly limns low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity. A rare view of "prosperity" from the bottom puts a human face to the lives sustaining our economy.

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