Collected from a series of articles published in the New York Times in the spring of 2005.

1 Shadowy Lines That Still Divide / Janny Scott, David Leonhardt 1 -- 2 Life at the Top in America Isn't Just Better, It's Longer / Janny Scott 27 -- 3 A Marriage of Unequals / Tamar Lewin 51 -- 4 Up from the Holler: Living in Two Worlds, at Home in Neither / Tamar Lewin 63 -- 5 On a Christian Mission to the Top / Laurie Goodstein, David D. Kirkpatrick 73 -- 6 College Dropout Boom / David Leonhardt 87 -- 7 No Degree, and No Way Back to the Middle / Timothy Egan 105 -- 8 Fifteen Years on the Bottom Rung / Anthony DePalma 111 -- 9 When the Joneses Wear Jeans / Jennifer Steinhauer 134 -- 10 Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life / Peter T. Kilborn 146 -- 11 Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New / Geraldine Fabrikant 166 -- 12 Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind / David Cay Johnston 182 -- 13 In Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap / Charles McGrath 192 -- 14 Angela Whitiker's Climb / Isabel Wilkerson 202 -- Encounters with Class 234 -- My Nanny Was a Dreadful Snob / Christopher Buckley -- Downwardly Mobile in Birmingham / Diane McWhorter -- From the Bronx to Cornell / Richard Price -- At the Top of the Bottom in the Segregated South / David Levering Lewis -- We Were Poor, but I Didn't Know It / Linda Chavez -- Appendix New York Times Poll on Class 244.