A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought.” or “I hadn’t realized.” When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then - down at the bottom - “Screw it, just make money.” There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity.
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