Summary

Pop culture – books, movies and TV – teach the populace that America is a homogenous, classless society. It is merely burying the truth – not killing it. The truth is still there under all that glitter – there are social classes and moving between them is in the least, tricky. There is not an overt obsession with class as in days gone by. Class in social encounters still rears its ugly head.

Pre-World War II, the movies and books were constant reminders of class divisions. Much of the entertainment was light but there were darker aspects of fictionalized dramas. In Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, written in 1925, class envy leads to murder. Other novels made the reader fear of waking up at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Such books were intended to strike fear in the hearts of the middle-class. Many authors of the...