William Matthew McCarter is a Pushcart nominated American author and scholar who has written extensively about "white trash" culture in fiction and nonfiction. His prolific fiction is influenced by such writers as Dorothy Allison and William Faulkner. McCarter is one of the few scholars who has used a cultural studies approach to understand white trash culture. His novel argument is that poor rural American whites can be considered an ethnic group facing similar prejudices as other minorities. He also explores in his fiction and nonfiction the ways class constructs social identity. Since publishing his first academic works on the subject of white trash culture, the issues of whiteness have become highly debated within sociology, literature, and other humanities in the American academy. 

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