Keith Gandal is professor of English at Northern Illinois University outside of Chicago. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.