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Over many years-in articles, online essays, and, later, books-Bageant (pronounced “Bay-gent”) had been something of a lone voice, trying to convince his readers that America’s class divisions are as significant to the American story as its race divide that the myth of American exceptionalism when it came to the absence of class is just that, a myth. Underneath it all he was, almost obsessively, writing about and analyzing his poverty-stricken childhood, and contemplating the displacement of the rural poor by the rise of agribusiness and the post-World War II service economy.

He’d talk about everything from making raccoon stew to the state of the union. Now, as he contemplated the onset of old age, Bageant was back in Winchester once more, gray-bearded, overweight, wearing determinedly unfashionable fishermen’s outfits, and hanging out with friends from a half-century earlier. He and a few friends had tried, and failed, to organize the reporters to join The Newspaper Guild he quit soon after and moved West again. During those years, Bageant worked as a reporter at the conservative local paper, the Winchester Star. In the late 1970s, he’d come back from Idaho for a while, after his father developed a bad heart, and moved into a mobile home in a poor part of town.

He and his third wife, Barbara, were renting a small, wooden house in Winchester, Virginia, the town where he grew up and from which he had fled repeatedly over the years-always returning, though never long enough to stay. In the last decade of his life, Joe Bageant came full circle.

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