Specific references to wealth and income were omnipresent in the literature of all countries before 1914; these references gradually dropped out of sight between 1914 and 1945 and never truly reemerged. This is true not only of European and American novels but also of the literature of other continents. The novels of Naguib Mahfouz, or at any rate those that unfold in Cairo between the two world wars, before prices were distorted by inflation, lavish attention on income and wealth as a way of situating characters and explaining their anxieties.
