The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

He had encountered people in graduate school who were eager to declare working-class pedigree, and they maybe had one parent with less education, or the family had been “poor,” but college-educated. Either way, if someone was insisting loudly on their own authentic origin, this was generally taken by Gordon as evidence they weren’t actually working-class. If they were from a background like Gordon’s, they would know to hide it, the way Gordon did, because the fact of his pioneering status was itself proof of just how tenuous his escape was.