Focusing on American fiction from 1850-1940, Narrating Class in American Fiction offers close readings in the context of literary and political history to detail the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities.

Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass: 'Hard Work and Blood' Class and the Performative in Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills and Steven Crane's Maggie Body Tramping, Class and Masculine Extremes: Jack London's The People of the Abyss 'Always Your Heart': Class Designs in Jean Toomer's Cane Meridel Le Sueur's Salute to Spring: 'A Movement Up Which All Are Moving' Class, Work and New Races: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth Class 'Truths' in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men