Jack London The Iron Heel (1908)
"The Iron Heel describes the fall of the United States to a cruel dictatorship of capitalists. Fearful of the backlash as economic squeezing brings the general population to ruin, the plutocrats of the Iron Heel conspire to eliminate democracy and economic independence with their secret police and military who terrorize the citizenry ..."
In 1908 Jack London wrote a book about America under a plutocracy bent on total economic domination and about the revolution fought against it by populists while the socialists and progressives, unwilling to mix with the middle classes, stand by and watch the populists get slaughtered -- but their turn come afterwards and the heroine narrator is summarily executed in the end -- the book is her letters, with commentary by a scholar's commentary written in the distant future. The book ends with the triumph of the the oligarchy. The book is depressingly on target -- at least so far in the progression of today's events -- and should considered not so much the "the great American novel," as the greatest American warning (which we have not heeded). How strange that this book is never read in colleges.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1164
http://www.soft32.com/Download/Free/The_Iron_Heel/4-16903-1.html