Whether they appear in mystery novels or headline news stories, on prime-time TV or the silver screen, few figures have maintained such an extraordinary hold on the American cultural imagination as modern police officers. Why are we so fascinated with the police and their power? What relation do these pervasive media representations bear to the actual history of modern policing?
Christopher P. Wilson explores these questions by examining narratives of police power in crime news, popular fiction, and film, showing how they both reflect and influence the real strategies of law enforcement...

In the three decades after 1885, a virtual explosion in the nation's print media--newspaper tabloids, inexpensive magazines, and best-selling books--vaulted the American writer to unprecedented heights of cultural and political influence. "The Labor of Words" traces the impact of this mass literary marketplace on Progressive era writers. Using the works and careers of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, and Lincoln Steffens as case studies, Christopher P. Wilson measures the advantages and costs of the new professional literary role and captures the drama of this...

At the turn of the twentieth century, representations of "white collar" Americans--the "middle" social strata H. L. Mencken ridiculed as boobus Americanus--took on an ever-greater prominence within American literature and popular culture. Magazines like the "Saturday Evening Post" idolized businessmen and "average Americans," while books like "Winesburg, Ohio and Babbitt" produced new portraits of "middle America." In "White Collar Fictions," Christopher P. Wilson explores how these white collar representations became part and parcel of a new social class coming to terms with its own power,...