Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-224) and index
Introduction : Breaking the glass -- I. The heroism of modern life? Baudelaire, Brecht and the founders of urban sociology -- II. Chicago black and white : immigration and race in Native Son and The Adventures of Augie March -- III. Power, governance and the struggle for human realization -- Epilogue : DeLillo's global city
Edward J. Ahearn shows that together works from literature and the social sciences can illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish separately. Whether viewing Charles Baudelaire alongside Emile Durkheim and Georg Semel or Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a challenge to James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy, Ahearn does justice to the complexity of his subject matter. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery
