Literary executions : capital punishment and American culture 1820 1925 In Literary Executions John Barton analyzes nineteenth century representations of responses to and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels short stories poems and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports trial transcripts legal documents newspaper and journal articles treatises and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows the Prison and the Poor House) all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures James Fenimore Cooper Nathaniel Hawthorne Lydia Maria Child Walt Whitman Herman Melville and Theodore Dreiser and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then popular but now forgotten writers particularly John Neal Slidell MacKenzie William Gilmore Simms Sylvester Judd and George Lippard whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti gallows movement. As illustrated in the books epigraph by Samuel Johnson Depend upon it Sir when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic Barton traces the emergence of the modern States administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it as will anyone interested in the intersections among law culture and the humanities