The NYT, Class and Literature

The New York Times has been publishing an ongoing series on class. A recent installment looked at how popular culture tackles the issue of class, concluding that yesteryear's novels were obsessed with issues of status, money and social mobility. The article (read it here) mentions a lot of classic American literature, including Theodore Dreiser's "American Tragedy" and Frank Norris' "McTeague." Somebody very smart at the NYT linked the book titles to pdf documents of the original reviews --now that's how you use multimedia to write about literature!

In a separate article in the series, the esteemed David Cay Johnston uses two titans of literature to kick off his story about how the tax code benefits the wealthiest Americans.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.
The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

I've written about David Cay Johnson before; he wrote the book "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else." I just can't say enough good things about his journalism. Read my previous post here.
The entire Times series on class can be accessed here.