Frances Fox Piven: 'Glenn Beck Decided' For Me to Do My New Book

Leftist professor and author Frances Fox Piven has revealed the inspiration behind her latest book: Glenn Beck.

In a new interview with Iran's Press TV, Piven said her 2011 "Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate" was prompted by all the attention she received on Beck's television program.

"About two-and-a-half years ago, Glenn Beck made me a target and incessantly, repeatedly featured me as a kind of evil conspirator in American politics," she said. "This was taken up by the right-wing blogs and by the Tea Party and by other strange people, that my publisher decided it would be a good idea to do the collection. So I didn't really decide, Glenn Beck decided, and I was glad to do it."

The book, she said, is a "lifetime of arguments that I've made for a very long time, since the mid-1960s."

"Most of 'Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?' consists of excerpts from essays or books that I've written over a very long time, 45 years," she said. "What I wrote recently is the introduction, which explains why this book is being published now and then little introductions to each excerpt from earlier work."

She continued, "The question really is, why this collection now? And the answer to that is well, Glenn Beck is the promoter of the book."