American culture glorifies the self-made man and this self-making extends to individual identity. The United States celebrates geographical and social mobility and the very anomie this produces is also the site of secular rebirths. In this essay, the author examines a literary genre that draws upon the American faith in self-transformation in an effort to confront the social boundaries that define its limits: narratives of white middle-class individuals who seek to live as an other for a while with the aim of revealing to their social group of origin its role in creating and sustaining the marginalization and oppression of the other whose identity they temporarily assume. John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me" and Grace Halsell's "Soul Sister" and "Bessie Yellowhair" were products of an era when the challenges that racial integration presented to white middle-class society gave new impetus to the tradition of participant-observer social scientists and journalists living as workers and reporting on the experience. The author concludes with a reading of recent accounts of inter- and intra-class passing: Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch," and Norah Vincent's memoir of gender passing, "Self-Made Man." (Contains 7 notes.)