Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital.

“A brilliant meditation on the centrality of detritus, debris, and depression to the cultural history and geography of American modernity. Jani Scandura’s book is a standout in a crowded field: innovative in its method and composition, elegantly written, and thickly documented, it is destined to become a key text in the new modernist studies.”-Rita Felski, author of Literature after Feminism “Part history, part ethnography, part self-reflection, and part psychogeography, Down in the Dumps performs a wholly original encounter with the American 1930s. Jani Scandura displaces the national economic narrative and the archive of migration narratives, WPA guides, and leftist manifestoes with local stories that transform the Great Depression from an economic tragedy into a tragicomic account of site-specific modernities.”-Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

• Images ixAcknowledgments xvIntroduction: A Geography of Depression 11. Reno: The Divorce Factory 302. Key West: The Nation and the Corpse 703. Harlem: Blue-Penciled Place 1224. Hollywood(land): Wax, Fire, Insomnia 186Afterword: The Prison and the Pentagon 234Notes 247Works Cited 285Index 303

Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital.

“A brilliant meditation on the centrality of detritus, debris, and depression to the cultural history and geography of American modernity. Jani Scandura’s book is a standout in a crowded field: innovative in its method and composition, elegantly written, and thickly documented, it is destined to become a key text in the new modernist studies.”-Rita Felski, author of Literature after Feminism “Part history, part ethnography, part self-reflection, and part psychogeography, Down in the Dumps performs a wholly original encounter with the American 1930s. Jani Scandura displaces the national economic narrative and the archive of migration narratives, WPA guides, and leftist manifestoes with local stories that transform the Great Depression from an economic tragedy into a tragicomic account of site-specific modernities.”-Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

• Images ixAcknowledgments xvIntroduction: A Geography of Depression 11. Reno: The Divorce Factory 302. Key West: The Nation and the Corpse 703. Harlem: Blue-Penciled Place 1224. Hollywood(land): Wax, Fire, Insomnia 186Afterword: The Prison and the Pentagon 234Notes 247Works Cited 285Index 303

Jani Scandura is Associate Professor of English and Co-Founder of the Space and Place Research Collective at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor of Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital.

“A brilliant meditation on the centrality of detritus, debris, and depression to the cultural history and geography of American modernity. Jani Scandura’s book is a standout in a crowded field: innovative in its method and composition, elegantly written, and thickly documented, it is destined to become a key text in the new modernist studies.”-Rita Felski, author of Literature after Feminism “Part history, part ethnography, part self-reflection, and part psychogeography, Down in the Dumps performs a wholly original encounter with the American 1930s. Jani Scandura displaces the national economic narrative and the archive of migration narratives, WPA guides, and leftist manifestoes with local stories that transform the Great Depression from an economic tragedy into a tragicomic account of site-specific modernities.”-Bill Brown, author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature

• Images ixAcknowledgments xvIntroduction: A Geography of Depression 11. Reno: The Divorce Factory 302. Key West: The Nation and the Corpse 703. Harlem: Blue-Penciled Place 1224. Hollywood(land): Wax, Fire, Insomnia 186Afterword: The Prison and the Pentagon 234Notes 247Works Cited 285Index 303