Jeffory Clymer is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the author of America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism and the Written Word (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

"Engaging and smartly conceived, Family Money shows the way interracial sex and intimacy has functioned as a volatile 'switching point' for distributions of wealth among black and white Americans. By examining legal cases, economic patterns, and racialized inheritance plots in fiction, Jeffory Clymer contends that the race concept itself is the product of an economic struggle. This innovative and beautifully written book is a must-read for students of the period."--Nancy Bentley, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920

"Family Money is a terrific book. Deeply researched and threaded through with persuasive careful readings, it brings a fresh angle to bear on the relations of fiction to law in nineteenth-century America by focusing brilliantly on the ways that interracial relationships entwine race with economics. It will interest anyone concerned with American literature, law and literature, African-American studies, and the cultural development of the novel in America."--Laura Korobkin, author of Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and 19th-Century Legal Stories of Adultery

"Jeffory Clymer's creative and resonant readings of American fiction map a complex, ever-shifting terrain of race, gender, and property from slavery to Jim Crow. His insights--and the alternative emotional economies imagined by American authors--reveal important new ways to think about the role of law in the history of race in the United States, and force us to acknowledge the extent to which we still live in a society defined by a persistent and deliberately constructed racial wealth gap."--Daniel J. Sharftstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America