By C. Wright Mills

In print for fifty years, White Collar by C. Wright Mills is considered a standard on the subject of the new middle class in twentieth-century America. This landmark volume demonstrates how the conditions and styles of middle class life--originating from elements of both the newer lower and upper classes--represent modern society as a whole.
By examining white-collar life, Mills aimed to learn something about what was becoming more typically "American" than the once-famous Western frontier character. He painted a picture instead of a society that had evolved into a business-based milieu, viewing America instead as a great salesroom, an enormous file, and a new universe of management.
Russell Jacoby, author of The End of Utopia and The Last Intellectuals, contributes a new Afterword to this edition, in which he reflects on the impact White Collar had at its original publication and considers what it means to our society today.
"A book that persons of every level of the white collar pyramid should read and ponder. It will alert them to their condition for their better salvation."-Horace M. Kaellen, The New York Times (on the first edition)

NY. Oxford University Press. 1951. 387p.

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

This book “is a solid indictment of how the rulemakers in Washington and the dealmakers on Wall Street have changed the rules of the game to favor the privileged, the powerful, and the influential — at the expense of everyone else.. Expanding on an unforgettable series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this book is the culmination of two years of research by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. Assembling over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewing men and women at all levels of the work force across the nation, Barlett and Steele have managed to tell the story we all suspected in language so clear—and graphics so dramatic—that every reader will see how the lives of all of us have been touched by public acts and private greed. America: What Went Wrong? is a gripping portrayal of the painful dismantling of the American middle class.

Universal Press Syndicate. 1992. 246p.