ABSTRACT
This chapter opens the part of the book dedicated to the heroism of simplicity in an opulent society that turns its eyes away from poverty and failure, often rejected and despised as “un-American”. Poverty appears either in the background or is the main subject of many works of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. These authors disregard the idea of the so-called “culture of poverty,” for which poor people are inevitably responsible for their own condition. The ultimate source of poverty is rather a “culture of wealth” deeply rooted in a society blindly devoted to the duty of wealth accumulation. In other words, these works reveal how poverty comes from economic scarcity and not individual character. Auster, Jarmusch and Waits defy conventional depictions of poverty, exposing the carelessness and negligence of richer Americans. The message that one can gather from the works of the Other America is that there are poor people in the United States because its economic structure is based on a free-market competition that excludes those who are materially dispossessed and offers no relief to poverty.
