July 14, 2006

'Panic! Markets, Crises, & Crowds in American Fiction'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Around the turn of the 20th century, a wave of financial panics shook the United States, driving investors to ruin and novelists to their pens and typewriters. There was a boomlet of financial fiction, says David A. Zimmerman, as writers gathered "like seismologists" around the latest quake.

The huge panics of 1893 and 1907, as well as many lesser shocks, provided ample material for literature, notes the scholar, who teaches English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In Panic!