Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | She Come By It Natural | 2020 | Sarah Smarsh | Buy |
| 2 | Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class | 2024 | Sarah Smarsh | Buy |
Sarah Smarsh followed her National Book Award finalist memoir Heartland with two more non-fiction titles that continue to examine American class and culture. She Come By It Natural (2020) began as a four-part series for roots-music magazine No Depression and grew into a book about how Dolly Parton’s songs and public life have represented a form of feminism for working-class women. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Time Top 100 Book of the Year.
Bone of the Bone (2024) gathers essays Smarsh wrote over more than a decade for outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian. The collection covers class division, political fault lines, gender inequality, and the gap between rural and urban America. Together with Heartland, these books form a body of work that keeps returning to the same core questions about who gets heard in American public life and why certain communities remain overlooked.