I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was born into an upper-middle class family in a village in the South of Sweden in April 1899. It was a large family with seven children, a large house, and a home which was very hospitable and open to friends and relatives.
My parents were determined to move into the middle class.
Contrary to public opinion and the image people have of me, I grew up in a very lower-middle-class, blue-collar environment 40 minutes outside of New York until I was 11.
In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.
I grew up a middle class, colonized child of teachers and librarians and people, women especially, who treasured education.
I grew up middle class - my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.
If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.
I'm not part of a middle-class establishment. I'm working class, and I grew up in a council house.
My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.
I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.