I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
The United States is a country where practically everybody considers himself middle class.
Oh, honey, I'm from Oklahoma! This is who I am - middle-class all the way!
In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.
Increasingly, staying in the middle class - let alone aspiring to become middle class - is becoming a game of chance.
The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
I'm painfully middle class.
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.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.