This chapter considers how strategies for representing the skyscraper indexed competing understandings of the nature of organization, a term with multiple valences in the early twentieth century. Whether one judged skyscrapers to be hideous blights or rapturous delights, few in the period failed to marvel at the powerful technic of organization marshaled by and for its mass. But to whom should its beholders credit that technic proved a harder matter to resolve. Descriptions of skyscraper construction by builder William Starrett and writers John Dos Passos and Willa Cather mark an oscillation between viewing this structure’s organization as an art, showcasing not just the skill but also the beauty of capital’s captivating choreography of bodies and materials used to materialize these structures, and organization as a politics, the active mobilization of laborers to resist modes of capitalistic organization by revealing the invisible and unaesthetic exploitation disguised by capitalism’s breathtaking arrangements.

This chapter demonstrates the critical synonymy of horror and capitalism in American literary narrative. Beginning with colonization before accelerating into the period of exponential growth from around the Civil War through the Great Depression, the chapter looks to scenes of indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, urban industrialization, unemployed immiseration, and finally to the reactionary suppression with which capital protects its interests. The guiding hypothesis is that horror obtains into all of these crucial areas of the economy because capitalist accumulation is, in all of its forms, a catastrophically exploitative relationship between humans that depends on sensuous creation and so requires the productive grist of blood, brains, and bodies.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

This introduction explores a range of theoretical approaches to reading the relationship between literature and credit. It suggests an alternative to the postmodern reading of the ending of the gold standard. It offers a new reading of E. L. Doctorow’s classic postmodern novel Ragtime, one that depends upon neither pastiche nor parody but a return to the varied times of the credit economy.