In 2009, as a deep recession triggered an epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures, the New York Times asked Barbara Ehrenreich to write a series of articles about poverty in the United States. She visited Los Angeles, where I introduced her to community, tenants’ rights, and union organizers. She also traveled to Detroit, Dallas, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Racine, Wisconsin, Wilmington, Delaware, and New York, talking with low-income people as well as with poverty researchers and activists. When she got back to her home in Virginia, she emailed me, “I’m ready to look over my notes and see where I’ve gotten to. It’s a bit overwhelming, but I’m feeling my anger level rising, so I better figure something out.”

What she figured out was that the composition of poverty was changing. In four remarkable articles ( “Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?,” “The Recession’s Racial Divide,” “Too Poor to Make the News,” and “A Homespun Safety Net”), she described two groups of Americans enduring hardship and destitution: the downwardly mobile middle class and those who had been poor before the economic downturn and for whom conditions had gotten even worse. But she also noted a burgeoning movement among the poor and their allies to challenge America’s indifference to poverty, low wages, and a bare-bones safety net.

Her reporting reflected her two unrelenting outlooks on life: outrage and hope. It was a tightrope that Ehrenreich — who died of a stroke on Thursday at eighty-one at a hospice facility in Alexandria, Virginia — walked during most of her life.