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 end of the Gilded Age with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) while reading selections from Stuart Chase’s Prosperity: Fact or Myth (1928) and Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’s What’s Wrong with the United States (1929), asking how novelists and social critics interpreted the roaring ‘20s. We then turn to life after the stock market crash of 1929 with excerpts from Theodore Dreiser’s Tragic America while examining how John Steinbeck viewed the problems of poverty and inequality in his Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Next, we shift to the neoliberal period, first watching Richard Fleischer’s dystopian film, Soylent Green (1973), produced during a period of rising inflation and economic insecurity, and then reading selections from Thomas Piketty’s analysis of inequality, Capital in the 21st-century (2011). Finally, we conclude with Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (2009).