Books: Where the Elite Don't Meet

CLASS: A GUIDE THROUGH THE AMERICAN STATUS SYSTEM by Paul Fussell; Summit; 202 pages; $13.95

In the '50s, books like Russell Lynes' The Tastemakers and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers were read by apprehensive Americans eager to appear just a little classier than they were. Their expectations implied that class was a matter not of birth and inheritance but of accomplishment and style. As a system, class belonged to a Europe of social barriers and humiliations that no American would stand for.

Or so it was believed. Paul Fussell, 59, a Pasadena-born Anglophile and former professor of English at Rutgers, asserts that there...

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