...This book explores how writers' perspectives on class, labor, and working-class people shifted in concert with particular historical contexts by tracking the tradition of undercover investigation from its Progressive Era origins and proliferation through a sequence of distinctive stages...

...This chapter examines how undercover investigation fared amid celebrations of postwar affluence. The return of peace and rising postwar prosperity in the later 1940s and 1950s was accompanied by a decline in the number of classic undercover investigations. The worlds of skid row, hobohemia...

...This chapter examines the beginnings of undercover investigation in the Progressive Era. From the early stirrings of social and political reform in the 1890s through the progressive heyday of the 1910s, writers, journalists, and social scientists chose to live and work in disguise among tramps...

...This chapter examines how undercover investigation ushered in a “New Era” of postwar labor militancy and 1920s industrial psychology, personnel management, and romantic vagabondage. It considers social investigators, such as Fannie Hurst and Whiting Williams, who promised to reveal not only workers...

...This chapter examines how undercover investigation endured defeats and struggles during the Great Depression. The Depression saw undercover writers shift their focus from work to unemployment. Images of downward mobility and poverty permeated print culture during the 1930s, from the reportage...

...This chapter examines the increasing prominence accorded to race in social thought and public discourse during the rise of the civil rights movement. In particular, it considers two important texts that both deal with undercover investigation: Laura Z. Hobson's 1947 novel Gentleman's...

...This chapter focuses on the persistence of undercover investigation in postmodern America, at a time when the very definitions of borders and identities underwent seemingly constant reconsideration. Although down-and-outers did not disappear after the 1960s, they would operate in dramatically...