The idea for this collection was born out of a chance encounter over coffee in a U.S. Starbucks. Over a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed the state of working-class literature as a field, the de-cline of Marxism in academia, our favorite working-class authors, and the lack of good coffe shops on U.S. campuses. We both gen-erally laid out the various trajectories of scholarly reception of working-class literature in our respective countries and realized that while there were similar trends, there were also stark differ-ences. The conversation became a bug that, in the coming weeks, we could not squash: Why, for example, was working-class litera-ture recognized as a central strand in national literature in Sweden while often discounted and marginalized in the U.S.? We each sep-arately and ineffectively chased that bug to no avail. Over email conversations, we tried to find common ground between these two national understandings but even that was difficult because we weren’t sure how the other defined fundamental terms. We contemplated how we define and categorize working-class litera-ture and questioned whether a common definition could translate across the Atlantic Ocean? Researching comparative approaches on Swedish-U.S. working-class literature quickly showed a dearth of scholarship on this particular relationship but even more im-portantly, we found that that there was very little comparative research on working-class literature across national boundaries at all. We quickly decided to co-write an essay specifically on Swedish and U.S. working-class literatures as a way to jump start this discussion.