This book examines the artistic use of freak shows between 1900-1950. During this period, the freak show shifted from a highly popular and profitable form of entertainment to a reviled one. But why? And how does this response reflect larger social changes in the United States at the time? Fahy examines this change and how artists responded.

Introduction 'Helpless Meanness': Constructing the Black Body as Freakish Spectacle War-Injured Bodies: Fallen Soldiers in American Propaganda and the Works of John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner Worn, Damaged Bodies in the Great Depression: FSA Photography and the Fiction of John Steinbeck, Tillie Olsen, and Nathanael West 'Some Unheard-of Thing': Freaks, Families, and Coming of Age in Carson McCullers and Truman Capote Breakfast at Brian's Epilogue

THOMAS FAHY Professor of English and Director of the American Studies Program at Long Island University, USA, C.W. Post Campus. He is the author of Staging Modern American Life (Palgrave), as well as three novels. He is also the editor of several collections, including The Philosophy of Horror; Considering Aaron Sorkin; Considering David Chase; and Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theatre.