Alan Ackerman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the author of numerous books, including Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011), a poet, and a teacher of innovative courses on trees and literature in environmental studies.

'Energy and Economy in American Literature is an arresting reappraisal of the new energy humanities by means of a cultural history of the heyday of American industrialization.' Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Environmental Imagination, Writing for an Endangered World, and The Future of Environmental Criticism

• 1. Burning ideas; 2. Emerson in Pittsburgh; 3. Apocalyptic rumblings: domestic economy and environmentalism; 4. Henry Adams on the track of energy; 5. Edith Wharton's aesthetic resources; 6. Black labor, coal, and the soul's economy.

Alan Ackerman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, the author of numerous books, including Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, 2011), a poet, and a teacher of innovative courses on trees and literature in environmental studies.

'Energy and Economy in American Literature is an arresting reappraisal of the new energy humanities by means of a cultural history of the heyday of American industrialization.' Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Environmental Imagination, Writing for an Endangered World, and The Future of Environmental Criticism

• 1. Burning ideas; 2. Emerson in Pittsburgh; 3. Apocalyptic rumblings: domestic economy and environmentalism; 4. Henry Adams on the track of energy; 5. Edith Wharton's aesthetic resources; 6. Black labor, coal, and the soul's economy.