Anna Sorokin, an émigré fashion student of modest means, became a very wealthy woman simply by pretending to be one. Her brief life of the rich and famous abruptly crashed down when she racked up too much debt, but not before she successfully executed a series of con-jobs that netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and left friends and associates with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars. After her conviction on three counts of grand larceny and her sentencing to four to twelve years in prison, Ms. Sorokin expressed to The New York Times that she was not sorry for her actions and would, given the chance, do it all over again. And she will be able to do so in the form of a Netflix biopic written by Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey's Anatomy and Scandal.
Sorokin's likely to be enduring fame testifies to the significance of one of Paul Cantor's central contentions in his most recent monograph, Popular Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream, which is that narratives of self-making cast a long shadow over American pop-culture, particularly where riches are concerned. Thus the blurry line between legitimate business and criminal activity forms a key structuring element for many of our pop-culture narratives. From the con-men and imposters who populate Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to the fragile and duplicitous feudal bureaucracies of The Walking Dead, Cantor offers his reader a selection of American pop-literature and film from 1885 to the present in which identity is a mask all too easily put on or taken off as needed.
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