Patrick Chura charts the downclassing processes in works of canonical nineteenth-century American authors, including Melville, Hawthorne, James, Howells and Jewett. He undertakes an original analysis of John Reed's involvement with the 1913 Paterson silk workers' strike as a context for understanding Ernest Poole's fictionalization of the strike in his novel, "The Harbor". In other richly historicized chapters, he analyzes distillations of class radicalism in several works by Upton Sinclair, in the early drama of Eugene O'Neill and in feminist novels of the 1910s by Elia Peattie and Clara Laughlin. The concluding chapter looks at sophisticated treatments of 'vital contact' in fiction of the 1930s by Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Richard Wright. This book presents Americanists with important new ways of thinking about various forms of class identification as they developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.