Acknowledgments -- Introduction. An overview and an underview: Uneven development and the social production of American underworlds -- Going down: Narratives of slumming in the ethnic underworlds of lower New York, 1890s-1910s -- Degenerate "Sex and the City": The underworlds of New York and Paris in the work of Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, 1910s-1930s -- The black underground: Urban riots, the black underclass, and the work of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, 1940s-1950s -- Wasted dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s -- White spaces and urban ruins: Postmodern geographies in Don DeLillo's underworld, 1950s-1990s.