Received well upon publication in 1983, Class is an eye-opener and a fun read. His The Great War and Modern Memory won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award in 1976. Paul Fussell is an English professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the author of several books, including BAD or The Dumbing of America (1991), Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (2002) and, most recently, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (2003). Fussell also turns his discerning eye to high profile Americans at the time like Ronald Reagan or Dan Rather. Almost everyone in America, he proposes, wants to be upper middle, whether they admit it or not.įussell's method is to observe and categorize Americans of different classes to the minutest detail: "when you look at a person you don't see 'Roman Catholic' or 'liberal': you see 'hand-painted necktie' or 'crappy polyester shirt' you hear parameters or in regards to." What follows are long descriptions of, for example, the importance of natural fibers to the upper middle class, the middle-class love of compliment giving, and the tendency of high proles to associate with brand names. Drawing from scholarly texts from de Toqueville, Whitman, Orwell, Terkel and scores of others, as well as his own fastidious and uncompromising notation of Americans' habits of dress, manners, attitudes and pastimes, Fussell issues a systematic analysis of American classes that is informative and, if you're not offended by blatant snobbery, enjoyable.Īlthough he gives credit to older two-, three- or five-class systems, Fussel proposes nine American classes, which he divides into three subgroups: Top out-of-sight, upper and upper middle in the first, middle, high prole, mid-prole and low prole in the second and destitute and bottom out-of-sight in the third. Reissued in paperback by Touchstone in 1992Ĭalled "a fine prickly pear of a book" by Wilfrid Sheed in The Atlantic, Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is an irreverent, uppity and generous survey of American class distinctions. Paul Fussel, Class: A Guide through the American Status System Video of guest speakers and Master Classes (requires RealPlayer).KEEP UP with journalists' beats in Blogfolio, updated throughout the day.
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