This book is a study of the electric sign in American literature and culture. Although this book is mainly about bulb and neon signs, it also deals with non-electric signs and related phenomena, such as movie sets. A central strategy of the author is to treat the architectural sign as semiotic and the semiotic sign as architectural. This technique serves a central thesis that the architectural sign, particularly the electric sign, made people more conscious of the "sign" in the semiotic senses of the word. In fiction, poetry and commentary, the electric SIGN became a "sign" of manifold meanings that this book explores: a sign of the city, a sign of America, a sign of the twentieth century, a sign of modernism, a sign of postmodernism, a sign of noir, a sign of naturalism, a sign of the beats, a sign of sign systems, a sign of tropes, a sign of the writers themselves, a sign of the sign itself.