Literacy in American Lives (2001) is a book by Deborah Brandt that depicts the dynamic conditions of literacy learning for Americans born between 1895 and 1985. Brandt uses the idea of Sponsors of Literacy as an analytical framework for approaching, describing, and analyzing her research and data. According to Brandt, sponsors of literacy are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way.” Literacy in American Lives uses the literacy histories of Americans from all walks of life to illustrate the effects that the changing economic, political, and sociocultural conditions in American society had on literacy acquisition and usage in the 1900s.