Slumming in New York

This study samples a number of New York "slumming" narratives - including Stephen Crane 's "Bowery tales", Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sport of the Gods", Hutchins Hapgood's "The Spirit of the Ghetto", and Carl Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven" - to characterize and examine the relationship between New York writing and the city's cultural environment from 1880 to 1930. Using the methods of ethnicity theory, black studies, regional studies, literary studies, and popular culture, Robert M. Dowling reveals the way in which "outsider" authors helped alleviate New York's mounting social anxieties by popularizing "insider" voices from neighborhoods as distinctive as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and Harlem.