Unsuspecting Souls The Disappearance of the Human Being

Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle created the most famous detectives in literary history: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. As skilled as those two sleuths were, they missed the nineteenth century's most outrageous crime, the death of the human being. People began to lose their essence. Scientists, philosophers, and writers all tried, unsuccessfully, to recalculate what it meant to be human. Ghosts and shades replaced human beings, and they mouthed off, from this side and the beyond.

Barry Sanders has received two Pulitzer Prize nominations for his works A Is for Ox and Alienable Rights, which he co–authored with Francis Adams. Recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, Sanders retired in 2005 from his post as professor of History of Ideas and English at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.