The notion of passing in American literature has an extended and complicated history. As one looks at the various ways American authors have dealt with the issue of passing and how this phenomenon manifests itself in literary characters, it is clear that passing-whether racial, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, or gendered-is a complex concept that lends itself well to explorations of identity issues and notions of American success. Reading Philip Roth's The Human Stain and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby together offers a discourse on passing that presents an important teachable moment about issues of selfhood and marginalized identities in the United States.In 2002, was a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student at Texas Christian University, teaching undergraduates and working on my dissertation, which focused on working-class literature. given the opportunity to teach a section of Major American Writers, decided to focus the course on the issue of passing, a notion had first become interested in after reading Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun while a master's student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The notion of passing was one that fascinated me in multiple ways. Having always been interested in the notion of the self as well as the representation of race in literature, passing was naturally something in which took great interest. However, also began to see important connections between the traditional notion of racial passing and the type of socioeconomic passing that saw in so many narratives, both fictional and autobiographical, about the working class. It became clear to me that passing was something that happened not only in a racial context, but also in terms of socioeconomic identity and representation. Therefore, the section of Major American Writers that taught was subtitled Racial and Socioeconomic Passing in Twentieth-Century American Literature. felt that introducing undergraduates to the idea of passing and helping them work through issues of racial and socioeconomic self-representation would be important, particularly at a school like Texas Christian University. In 2002, when taught this course at TCU, Ray Brown, dean of admissions, reported that minority enrollment for incoming students [was] the lowest it ha[d] been in five years at an estimate of 14 percent (Vega, par. 8). also knew from my own experiences as an undergraduate at this school that social class was something rarely discussed and more often shrouded. While many students at TCU may have been on scholarship or financial aid, the perception all often was that the university was a place for the wealthy and privileged. As such, felt bringing issues of class and race to the forefront would make for an interesting course. For the reading list, students worked with Nella Larsen's Passing, Fauset's Plum Bun, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Danzy Sennas Caucasia, and Roth's The Human Stain.Additionally, supplemented novels with outside readings from Jet and Tan, two popular African American periodicals that, particularly in the 1950s, published a number of confessional tales about passing. One example, I Passed for Love from a 1953 issue of Tan, tells the story of a woman who passes and then struggles with revealing her secret. The brief introduction to this story demonstrates the melodramatic nature that this genre often took: When love came to Betty, she was gripped by the chilling fear that she would have to reveal her racial identity and thereby spoil everything. But Steve, she found, had a secret, too (33). used this selection from Tan as a way of helping students see that passing and its complications have long been a part of the popular psyche. While many of stories tell of passing for various personal and communal reasons, a subset in this genre deals with the problems with and, in many cases, the rejection of passing. As Gayle Wald points out in Crossing the Line, these articles, produced in an era of national economic prosperity and growing impatience with de jure segregation, deploy the trope of the refusal to pass (or to be passed, through the agency of others) as a means of giving voice to aspirations regarding African Americans' economic, political, and social well-being (118; emphasis in original). …