While having lunch one day in the 1990s with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s magazine, and discussing whether it was possible to live on the lowest wages, Barbara Ehrenreich, who has died aged 81, leaned across the table and told Lapham: “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism – you know, go out there and try it.”
Lapham smiled, perhaps thinking about the exploits of earlier US writers, Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair, and George Orwell with his 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London. He suggested the person who should do it was her.
