Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. ix + 367 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Working-Class Hollywood examines the content, the audience composition, and the organization of the silent movie industry from the nickelodeon era beginning in 1905 to the arrival of sound at the end of the 1920s with an epilogue on working-class movies since then. Steven Ross focuses on the depiction of the working class and of labor–capital struggles based on an exhaustive survey of silent films. He discusses the growth and changes in the movie industry which explain the modifications in treatments of class in movies, and how labor organizations responded to commercial images of class in their own movie productions.