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In a pioneering essay first appearing in Radical Teacher in 1979, Paul Lauter defined working-class writing in a way that remains useful. Deliberately employing "relatively loose definitions" and "broad categories," Lauter included texts "by and about working people, written and oral forms, [and] `high,' `popular,' and `mass' culture." He designated as members of the working class "those who sell their labor for wages; who create in that labor and have taken from them `surplus value,' to use Marx's phrase; who have relatively little control over the nature or products of their work; and who are not `professionals' or `managers.'" Lauter referred to "people who, to improve their lot, must either move in solidarity with their class or leave it (for example, to become managers)" and he included not only factory workers but also slaves, farm laborers, and those who work in the home (110). The obfuscation of class as a category of literary analysis has consequences within the academy, forestalling alliances across identities of race, culture, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability among scholars and among our students. I am reminded of classroom experiences in which students who are active in campus groups (the Asian American Student Union, the African American Student Alliance, the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Task Force, etc.) react with surprise and confusion at their identification with the "wrong" text -- the Chinese American who wonders why Eva in Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle" (1961) "is my grandmother"; the Puertorriquena who says she never expected to find her "mother's story" in Olsen's Yonnondio (1974); the African American who sounds an alarm when Anzia Yezierska's "Children of Loneliness" (1923) resonates more for her than Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). At the time that Lauter's pioneering essay on working-class writing appeared in Radical Teacher, I was a beginning graduate student in English at UCLA. In exceptional cases, UCLA's Graduate Council, the governing board for all graduate programs at the University, allowed students who had "excelled" (their term) at least one year in traditional Ph.D. programs to propose individualized interdisciplinary doctorates. I proposed to the Council an individualized Ph.D. in postbellum U.S. literature and history, with emphases on critical theory, working-class literature, labor history, and the history of the American Left. Most literature professors advised me against pursuing these interests and against interdisciplinary scholarship in general. Repeatedly, I heard discouraging remarks such as these: "You'll be neither fish nor fowl." "You won't be eligible for funding in either department." "You won't get a job when you finish." "Working-class literature? That's so old-fashioned." "You want to study Socialists and Commies? They were a bunch of losers."