This study offers readings of the relationship between property and identity in six texts: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926), Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” (1937), and William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942). Though land has historically been the paradigmatic form of property in the United States, by the late nineteenth century the land-based conception of property was rendered functionally inadequate by a constellation of forces associated with the development of corporate capitalism. In response, the legal definition of property shifted from tangible things to a combination of tangible and intangible interests. The resulting mobility as well as an increased sense of personal insecurity. Attending to the way the fictional works treated in this study register this transformation of property relations discloses the importance their authors attached to it. My central thesis is that all six authors conceive of personal identity as dependent on stable relationships to one’s surroundings. Thus, the texts represent the impact of changing property relations on personal identity in remarkably consistent ways, though gathered from different regions, falling under the rubrics of realism, naturalism and modernism, and written over a period of more than fifty years. Descriptions of the material circumstances of everyday life in these works reflect more than realist commitment to detail–they register the dependence of certain forms of identity on constitutive relationships to physical property (land, household furnishings, heirlooms). When such relationships are threatened in these texts by new legal and economic conditions (including commodification, corporatization, and urbanization), stable identity is threatened as well. I argue both that the preoccupation of the writers in question with changing property relations is integrally connected to their evolving attention to the problem of identity and the possibilities of narrative structure in the years between 1880 and 1940, and that the connection between identity and property plays a more significant role in the fictional works discussed than critics have generally recognized.