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As the presidential campaign has unfolded, the candidates have traded polemics about wealth, class warfare, dependency and the role of government.

And while it may be uncomfortable to admit, some Americans are simply more financially successful than others. But why do some achieve wealth, while others struggle? And what do we think explains our prosperity — or lack thereof?

In a three-part series, All Things Considered host Robert Siegel visited North Carolina's Research Triangle area, to ask people from very different walks of life how they account for their economic station in life. The series begins at the very top of the economic ladder.

Enlarge Art Sliverman/NPR

Bob Hatley's parents struggled to make ends meet when he was a boy. He says his competitiveness and his drive to emulate successful people eventually enabled him to open his own bank.

In a piece in the Washington Post, retired Army officer John Nagl argues that the U.S. has forgotten what losing a war really looks like. Nagl talks about what's been accomplished in Afghanistan, and the concerns that remain.

Hurricane Sandy has thrown an unexpected curveball into the presidential campaigns, with just over a week left until Election Day. Host Michel Martin discusses how this might impact the race with Pulitzer-prize winning columnist and journalism professor Cynthia Tucker, and Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with Concerned Women for America.

Many of my all-time favorite novels have a common (if slightly unsettling) thread: They feature an unreliable narrator at the helm. The term was popularized in the 1960s by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth, but the unreliable narrator herself has been around at least as long as the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales. An unreliable narrator is one who tells a tale with compromised credibility, whether the narrator herself understands that or not. The reader usually finds this out only slowly, as cracks in the narrator's version of events begin to appear. For the reader, figuring out what really did happen is an unending but joyful mystery.