Description: Crowd Control tells the story of how efforts to contain Black resistance led to the invention of American literary excellence.
Review Quotes: What does literature have to do with the work of the state? In Crowd Control, Grossman, Spahr, and Young tell the overdetermined story of the grant and the prize and their power in US letters and beyond. Crunching data and tracking quiet influence, they deliver us a new, essential history of the undeniably racialized political aims of literary infrastructures.--Hannah Zeavin, University of California, Berkeley