Our Invisible Poor

[Dave Monroe]

"If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other
town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found
The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred
lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd
looked." (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 178)

http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/6/pynchon/lot6.htm

Books
Our Invisible Poor
by Dwight MacDonald
January 19, 1963

[...]

... Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund
for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent
and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has
written “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” (Macmillan).
In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines
the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor
in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by
economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the
persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is
an excellent book—and a most important one.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1963/01/19/1963_01_19_082_TNY_CARDS_000075671


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/How-a-New-Yorker-Article-Launched-the-First-Shot-in-the-War-Against-Poverty-165589956.html

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70:

By the end of the novel the Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is
no longer a ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic) but a
real, 'embattled' underground about to come out of the shadows.  No
longer hovering on the edge as a cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the
Tristero has thus far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described ....  This
America is 'the America of poverty,' 'hidden today in a way it never
was before,' 'dispossessed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'    "Looking back on the novel from the perspective
of its finale, it could almost be viewed as a New Deal novel,
concerned with gathering back into the American fold a 'third world'
previously excluded...." (pp. 149-50)

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?ISBN=9780521381635

Cf., e.g.:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0907&msg=137034

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706