If you want to know more about the working class and you want to read one book . . .
• Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
If you want to read five more, add:
• Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press, 2016.
• Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
• Jennifer Sherman, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
• J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016.
• “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict,” Joan C. Williams and Heather Boushey, 2010, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2010/01/25/7194/the-three-faces-of-work-family-conflict/.
If you want to know more, add:
• Julie Bettie, Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
• Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett, The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
• Naomi Gerstell and Dan Clawson, Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014.
• Joseph T. Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families, revised edition with a new Preface and Epilogue. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2017.
• Maria Kefalas, Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
• Lillian B. Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
If you want to read more about the professional elite:
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.
• Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992.