From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion--sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative--from the realities of their own lives.

In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the...