Panic!: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels in the period that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined — and in one case, incited — market crashes and financial panics.

Panic! examines how Americans' attitudes towa...