Rich Man, Poor Man

Rich Man, Poor Man is a novel by the American writer Irwin Shaw, published in 1969.

The book is set in a small American town and follows the children of an embittered immigrant family, Rudolph, Gretchen and Thomas Jordache, from the end of the Second World War into the following decade. Each of them takes a different route towards what they have been brought up to believe success is: one through respectability and public life, one through work and love, and one through violence and the opportunities that come with it. Shaw writes in a long, panoramic style that follows the three of them through their marriages and their failures, and the novel keeps the country itself in view, with the expatriate Americans of the period and the politics of the 1950s part of the landscape. The title comes from a line in an old nursery rhyme.

The book was one of Shaw's most widely read, and the television version broadcast in 1976 brought the story to a much larger audience.