Explore various literary interpretations of the American Dream, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , through expert commentary and visual re-creations that bring fictional characters to life.

Many of America's finest writers have wrestled with the inequities that belie the American Dream - class and money and, often, a false promise of upward mobility. These themes are reflected through universal characters found in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth ; in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath ; in Ann Petry's The Street , in Gish Gen's Typical American and in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day . Passages from each book are dramatized through still photography that is inventively animated and coupled with original and archival footage.