ABSTRACT
In 1990, Ze'ev Chafets, in his sensationalistic Devil's Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, labeled Detroit America's "first major Third-World City". Interrogating familiar, popular narratives provides a context for analyzing the continuing challenges faced by this maligned and misunderstood American city, creating a focused experience of the relationship between place, history, and literature. The narrative describing Detroit's fall from a prosperous, harmonious past is pervasive in and around the city. Of course, Detroit had those relatively high-paying factory jobs, but, as Sugrue notes, African-Americans worked in the "dirtiest and most dangerous" automobile plant departments. Detroit is the American city that most manifestly reflects the racial segregation that permeates American society. Contrary to what too many of the media's and Chafets's images tell us, Detroit represents ill-distributed wealth, racial hatred, violence, drugs, poverty, unemployment and social dis-integration little, if any, more than other urban areas in America.
