Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

A Wickedly Witty Field Manual for Decoding the Unspoken Rules of American Hierarchy

There are books you read to confirm your worldview. Others you read to dismantle it. And then there’s Class by Paul Fussell: a brisk slap to the face, half-mocking, half-mirror, wholly illuminating. Originally published in 1983, this cultural autopsy arrives today like a telegram from a snobbish cousin we can’t quite ignore.

Fussell, whose past work made him an oracle of literary and cultural trench warfare, here marches into a battlefield no less fraught: the American status system. “Class,” he begins, is our nation’s true taboo — not sex, not politics, but the galling idea that not all Americans are created equal in taste, style, or speech, no matter what the Constitution says.

And that’s Fussell’s enduring genius: he refuses to accept the official fiction that America is classless. In fact, he believes we’re so class-ridden, we can’t even admit it. “You can outrage people today simply by mentioning social class,” he writes, and proceeds to do exactly that across nine deliciously acidic chapters and an appendix that feels like a final twist of the knife.

The book divides American society into nine distinct classes, from the “top out-of-sight” (the truly invisible rich, whose driveways you’ll never find on GPS) to the “bottom out-of-sight” (equally invisible, but for reasons involving institutions and bus…