Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Theory of American Vernacular Modernism

1“The Steady Reaching Out for New and Vivid Forms”: H. L. Mencken and the American Revolution of the Word

2“Never Mind the Comical Stuff. . . . They Ain’t No Joke about This!”: Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and the Comic Origins of Vernacular Modernism

3“I Didn’t Understand the Words, but My Voice Was Like Dynamite”: Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American Break with Realism

4“Say It with Lead”: Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Modernism’s Underworld Vernacular

5“The Necromancy of Language”: Realist Uplift and the Urban Vernacular in Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay

Conclusion: Modernism’s Familial Relations

Notes

Bibliography

Index