ABSTRACT
The sociology of class goes back to the classic works of Karl Marx whose turgid writings were devoid of persons and filled with moralistic battles between good and evil classes and abstract conceptual systems such as capitalism and socialism, bourgeois and proletariat. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests the corruption of the wasp upper-class after the First War through the characters of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and their good friend, the cheating lady golfing champion, A. R. Gurney is more direct and sociological, replacing characters with a few anonymous actors and actresses playing a variety of upper-class roles. Fitzgerald’s contemporary, Phillip Barry, wrote his most successful plays about the upper-class during its Indian Summer in the twenties and thirties. In the hopeful and humane inter-war years, Barry and Fitzgerald were writing in the tradition of Charles Dickens.
