David Zimmerman is Ritzmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowdsin American Fiction (University of North Carolina, 2006), and his essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, The Cambridge History of the American Novel, and elsewhere. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of American literature and economics in the nineteenth century, and his current book project explores the close relation between U.S. literature and the concept of moral complicity in the first half of the nineteenth century.