"In this book, Jeremy Tambling looks at European-formed reactions to America and American cities in the nineteenth century. Dickens visited America in 1842 and his American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit set the agenda for future discussions of America. Tambling looks at Dickens's legacy through Henry James in The American Scene, through H. G. Wells in The Future in America, and especially through Franz Kafka in The Man Who Was Never Heard of Again.

Lost in the American city explores the changes in American nineteenth-century urban culture that made America so different and so impossible to map, and that made American modernity so unreadable and challenging."--BOOK JACKET.