Speculative Time examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, and on important aspects of visual representation. Crosthwaite's expansive study argues that fictions of speculation enable us to think differently and in nuanced ways about questions of temporality, futurity, and chronology. Beautifully written, persuasively argued, and impeccably historicised, the book is essential reading not only for economic critics but for anyone interested in American literature of the long twentieth century.