Edward Michael Harrington (February 24, 1928 – July 31, 1989) was an American socialist.

Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Holy Cross College, University of Chicago (MA in English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young man, he was interested in both radical politics and Catholicism. Appropriately, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement. He was an editor of The Catholic Worker from 1951 to 1953. He ultimately moved towards secular socialism and became a member of the Independent Socialist League, a small organization associated with the former Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington then became a member of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party when Shachtman and Thomas agreed to merge their organizations. Harrington would back Shachtman's realignment perspective that meant the abandonment of independent socialist organisation in favour of working within the Democratic Party.

He wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States in 1962, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty. He was probably the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime, a status William F. Buckley once compared to being "the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas." He was one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America.

References

• Harrington, Michael, , New York: Macmillan, 1962, (ISBN 068482678X)
• ---- The Accidental Century
• ---- Toward a Democratic Left: A Radical Program for a New Majority, New York : Macmillan, 1968
• ---- The Retail Clerks
• ---- Socialism, New York: Bantam, 1970, 1972. "To the memory of Norman Thomas. And the future of his ideals."