Class Inequality has become such a topical issue that it’s easy to forget how its concerns have always formed a part of American discourse. This course begins at the end of the 19th century with Thorstein Veblen’s chapters on conspicuous consumption, dress, and conservatism in his Theory of the Leisure Class, before proceeding to two early 20th-century novels with themes anchored around upward and downward mobility: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1903) and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1907). From there, we examine the Gilded Age with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) while reading selections from Stuart Chase’s Prosperity: Fact or Myth, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’s What’s Wrong with the United States, and Theodore Dreiser’s writings (e.g., Tragic America, 1931), asking how novelists and social critics interpreted the roaring ‘20s. We then turn to life after the stock market crash of 1929, exploring how John Steinbeck viewed the problems of poverty and inequality in his Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Next, we shift into the neoliberal period, first watching Richard Fleischer’s dystopian film, Soylent Green (1973) before turning to Stephen King’s horror novel Shining (1976), both of which were produced during a period of rising inflation and economic insecurity. Finally, we turn to Thomas Piketty’s analysis of inequality in selections from Capital in the 21st-century (2011) and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2009).