10 Best Books for Understanding American Class

While most Americans like to believe they live in a meritocracy, in which one can bootstrap from the assembly line to the board room with nothing more than moxie and a dream, that is not really the case. The following books unpack the hard realities of an American class system as entrenched as the 18th-century aristocracy the Founders so famously rejected.

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Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962)

During the general prosperity of the post-war 1950s, the prevailing belief was that the New Deal had ended mass poverty. Michael Harrington’s slim but seminal, The Other America, galvanized a shift in this thinking, arguing that up to a quarter of the country still lived in poverty; “[the poor] are not simply neglected and forgotten,” Harrington wrote, “what is much worse, they are not seen.” Harrington was a political activist, theorist, writer and professor, and a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The Other America, and its review in The New Yorker, “Our Invisible Poor” by Dwight Macdonald, are thought to have energized LBJ’s War on Poverty, which brought about social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.   

Paul Fussell, CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)

In Class Paul Fussell does not hold back. He depicts the American class system meticulously and brutally, with acerbic wit, unfazed by the truth, unafraid of skewering. But as Dwight Garner puts it in the New York Times, “the line between wit and cruelty is always a fine one, and that’s especially true in ‘Class.’ But it’s not an insensitive book. Sensitivity is, in fact, among its themes.” Fussell was an American cultural and literary historian, prolific author, and professor. 

Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016)

Matthew Desmond’s Evicted investigates the connection between housing and poverty, exposing how “mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.” (As quoted by the Pulitzer Prize committee, Evicted won for General Non-Fiction in 2017). Desmond, a Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “genius,” researched the book through in-depth fieldwork, living in a trailer park and a rooming house in poor parts of Milwaukee for over a year. From this experience, he is able to tell the stories of eight families trying and struggling to make rent, as well as the landlords doing the evicting, to connect the two ends of the narrative and fully illustrate the cycles of American poverty.

NYT 10 Best Books 2016 • NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (so far) 

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) 

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to answer the question: “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?” by trying to do so. The book is an account of that experience. As an award-winning journalist, activist and prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America, Ehrenreich set clear parameters for the project, stating that she would obviously not “experience poverty” in “only visiting a world that others inhabit full-time.” Instead, she aims, simply, to “match income to expenses.” And implores the reader to “bear in mind, when I stumble, that this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths.”   

The Guardian and NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (so far) • Winnner of The Christopher Award

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson begins Caste with the description of a photograph from 1936. One man in a crowd of a hundred or more crosses his arms across his chest while every other man “heil[s] in unison.” Wilkerson writes that we “all want to believe that we would have been him.” And instead turns to the question: “what would it take to be him now?” In Caste, Wilkerson defines American racism as a caste system, drawing comparisons to caste systems in India and Nazi Germany, by laying out eight pillars of such systems. The result is “one of the most powerful nonfiction books [critic Dwight Garner]’d ever encountered.” (In a review of Caste in the NYT, he calls it “an instant American classic” that “lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside [Wilkerson].”) 

Winner of a 2020 LA Times Book Prize • Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2020 • 2 PEN Awards • Goodreads Choice Award • Oprah’s Book club pick 

Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City (2021)

In Invisible Child, investigative journalist Andrea Elliott tells the story of 11-year-old Dasani, who lives in a Brooklyn homeless shelter with her family, over a moving portrait of eight years during the homelessness crisis in New York City. Elliott’s 2013 NYT profile of Dasani set the book in motion, but the book Invisible Child is not only a biography, it “weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north,” “successfully merg[ing] literary narrative with policy analysis.”

Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for General Non-Fiction, alongside many other awards.   

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013)

Thomas Piketty is a French economist and professor and Capital in the Twenty-First Century takes the economist’s approach. The book, which is not short, analyzes wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. Centrally outlining the thesis that when the rate of capital return is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth (which it is in the developed countries he looks at), wealth inequality increases by concentrating instead of distributing wealth. The conclusion Piketty comes to is that inequality is not an accident, but a feature of capitalism, and can only be addressed, now, with state intervention. Though many economists disagree, what Piketty lays out is a theory worthy of investigation. If we do nothing, will the distribution of capital really begin to resemble the 19th century again? Where “economic elites have predominantly inherited their wealth rather than working for it”? (Matthew Yglesias in Vox).

2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (General Nonfiction) finalist 

Joseph Sitglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future  (2012)

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz rejects the idea that inequality is inevitable—that it is a result of globalization, and the automation we remain powerless to stop. Instead, Stiglitz makes a simple and compelling counterargument: rent seeking. (Rent seeking is the act of gaining wealth through manipulation of the social or political that does not create wealth in society at large.) Furthermore, Stiglitz describes the disastrous effects inequality has on the economy at large, that “excessive inequality amounts to sand in the gears of capitalism,” and lays out an argument for where we might go from here (NYT review).   

Received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2013 Book Award

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

American historian and professor Nancy Isenberg poses the question: “How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?” In White Trash, she seeks to answer this question: through “a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority,” “ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’” (NYT review).

A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)

Historian and political scientist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States tells the story of America from the perspective oft left out of the textbooks—“America’s women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.” In doing so, he “fundamentally changed the way millions of people think about history” (introduction to the 35th Anniversary Edition by Anthony Arnove) and indeed “changed the conscience of a generation” (Noam Chomsky). The book has sold over four million copies. 

As Zinn put it himself, “my history …describes the inspiring struggle of those who fought slavery and racism, of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people, of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism.” “I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties” (Letter to the NYT in response to Walter Kirn’s book review).

Runner up for the National Book Award in 1980

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With contributions from Catherine Habgood