Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature and Film

Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at NYU Law School, writes mainly about tax policy and inequality. Anthem Press published his well-regarded prior literary study, Literature and Inequality, in 2020.

• CHAPTER 1 Introduction; CHAPTER 2 Winners and Losers in Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds Lecture and the John Galt Speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; CHAPTER 3 Pessimism for Optimists and Voyeurism for Pessimists in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; CHAPTER 4 Bailey Versus Belfort: Comparing It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wolf of Wall Street; CHAPTER 5 Conclusion; Bibliography; Index 125

“This is a wonderful book, a page-turner about popular American thinking about the American Dream. Shaviro shows how much of our cultural experience consists of economic fantasies, and how much in turn those fantasies shape our culture and our politics. Brilliant, accurate, surprising, and unfailingly interesting.” — William Flesch, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USA.