The New York Times to Publish ''Class Matters,'' a 10-Part Series on Class in America.

NEW YORK -- Beginning on Sunday, May 22, The New York Times will publish a 10-part series of articles exploring class in American society and how class manifests itself in contemporary life, including where we live, where we work, where we are educated and how healthy we are. A team of Times reporters spent more than a year looking at class differences among Americans and speaking with people from a wide cross-section of the country to discover how they view their own place in society.

A specially-commissioned poll, the first such in-depth survey of attitudes on class, found many Americans are optimistic about their own chances of getting ahead, though they recognize that some groups have advantages over others. They support the idea of "affirmative action" to equalize opportunities for lower-income people.

"The issue of class is an important one for us to pursue in the pages of The Times because it is so rarely discussed or even acknowledged in our supposedly classless society and yet it has major ramifications in people's lives," said Bill Keller, executive editor, The New York Times. "We live in a world where class, defined by economic and social status, largely determines the course of most people's lives. We felt it was time to explore what the American class system looks like today and how it has evolved over the years."

The series captures the essential contradictions of class in the United States, a country that was founded on egalitarian principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. The series also suggests there is something in our national consciousness that keeps us from talking about class.

"As our reporters talked to people for this series, they discovered a reluctance to discuss class," said Soma Golden Behr, assistant managing editor, The New York Times. "For many it seems to conflict with the promise of America and the belief that we alone determine our own destinies. But the truth is that class has enormous power in some crucial areas of our lives."

Times reporters discovered that economic and social changes over the past 30 years - rising affluence, cheaper goods, easy credit - have made class less recognizable in America. At the same time, new research suggests that social mobility (the movement from one economic group to another) has flattened or declined over the last 15 years. Meanwhile, other factors such as the widening income disparity, weak school systems in many places and increasingly unaffordable health care have increased the impact of class in areas such as education and health.

Janny Scott follows three individuals of different classes who all had heart attacks in the past year and chronicles their contrasting experiences with the health care system and recuperation. David Leonhardt explores our nation's college dropout epidemic and how it plays out across class lines, keeping those who do not earn degrees from moving ahead.

One class within a class is the "relo" (relocation) class. Peter Kilborn writes about this affluent, nomadic group of white-collar executives and their families who move every few years at the request of their companies, living in isolated, homogeneous communities and forfeiting the traditional roots of a "hometown."

Laurie Goodstein and David Kirkpatrick report on the power of class as illustrated by the rise of Christian evangelicals. Their story focuses on an evangelical graduate of Brown University whose mission, one that is shared by a growing number of influential businessmen and politicians, is to change the culture of the country by proselytizing on Ivy League campuses.

Anthony DePalma describes the plight of many Mexican immigrants in New York City, who are in danger of becoming a perpetual, ever-replenishing underclass in America. Geraldine Fabrikant explores the other class extreme with a story on how the "superrich" joust with the old money in Nantucket.

Revealing that class differences mean much more than we may realize, Tamar Lewin looks at people who have confronted the issue of class in their own lives. In one case, she introduces us to a couple that bucked a growing trend by marrying out of their classes and discovered the daily challenges that result. In another story, she follows a successful lawyer who rose from backwoods poverty in Kentucky and now faces an awkward return to her hometown.

"This series provides an in-depth look at one of the last journalistically unexplored territories of our society's landscape: how class works," said Ms. Behr. "We felt it was important to bring this subject out of the shadows and examine it."

Online at www.nytimes.com/class, readers will find first-person audio and additional photographs of the people featured in the series, plus interactive graphics, reader discussions and the complete series.

The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with 2004 revenues of $3.3 billion, includes The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other newspapers, eight network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and more than 40 Web sites, including NYTimes.com and Boston.com. For the fifth consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1 in the publishing industry in Fortune's 2005 list of America's Most Admired Companies. The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

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