American gothic

Charles L. Crow edited American Gothic, which came out in 1999. It is a collection of Gothic short stories, novellas and poems from the United States, arranged so that the pieces speak to one another rather than standing alone.

The editor's interest is in what the American Gothic was actually about, and the book's organising themes are drawn from the anxieties of the period. Chief among them are the horror of illness and bodily decay in an age of incurable infectious disease; the suspicion between men and women as the roles assigned to each of them shifted; the relation between human beings and machines; the possibility that something monstrous is concealed inside an outwardly ordinary family; and, inescapably, the tragedy of race in America.

The authors include some of the best known names in nineteenth-century American writing, among them Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson and Mark Twain, alongside others who are obscure or have only recently begun to be read again. Crow wrote the introduction and the headnotes, and the book has been used since as a way into a body of writing that had usually been treated as a minor branch of the supernatural.