Cover -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: The Anguish None Can Draw -- 1 Black People's Ally, White People's Bogeyman: A John Brown Story -- 2 "The Blood of Millions": John Brown's Body, Public Violence, and Political Community -- 3 John Brown, Bearded Patriarch -- 4 "Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song": John Brown and Public Poetry -- 5 Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and the Transcendent Intellectual -- 6 Transforming the "Madman into a Saint": The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History -- 7 Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle -- 8 Transatlantic Spartacus -- 9 W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown: Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a Socialist Politics -- 10 "I see your mouth calling/before the words arrive": Muriel Rukeyser's "The Soul and Body of John Brown" and 1930s America -- 11 John Brown and Children's Literature -- 12 More Heat than Light: The Legacy of John Brown in Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y.