Rich Man, Poor Man is a 1969 novel by Irwin Shaw. It is a sprawling work, with over 600 pages, and covers many of the themes Shaw returns to again and again in all of his fiction – Americans living as expatriates in Europe, the McCarthy era, children trying to break away from the kind of life lived by their parents, social and political issues of capitalism, and the pain of relationships.
The bulk of the novel concerns the three children of German Americans Mary Pease and Axel Jordache – the eldest, Gretchen, the middle child, Rudolph, and the youngest, Thomas. It chronicles their experiences from the end of World War II until the late 1960s.
Originally published as a short story in Playboy Magazine, it became an international bestseller when published as a novel. It was adapted into a 1976 miniseries.
(This description comes mostly from Wikipedia.)