Mocking Eugenics

Ewa Barbara Luczak is Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw and President of the Polish Association for American Studies. She is the author of How Their Living in Europe Affected Five African American Authors, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century and the co-editor of New Cosmopolitanism, Race and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives.

• Introduction 1. “I am for the little man”: Charlie Chaplin’s comedies and the eugenic American 2. Is the “strenuous life” a pleasant life? Euthenic efficiency, racial duty, and the phenomenon of Anita Loos 3. Eugenic marriages and psychometrics in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! and The Vegetable 4. Cosmopolitanism vs. eugenic racial nationalism: Ernest Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race 5. For “the betterment of the human family”? California sterilizations, Wallace Thurman, and Tomorrow’s Children Conclusions: Could it have happened here? The borderline existence of anti-eugenic satire