On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed by electric chair at Auburn State Prison in Auburn, New York. The chair, designed by Harold P. Brown with the support of Thomas Edison as part of his campaign against alternating current, used a massive electrical current to kill the condemned man. The execution in Auburn was botched, requiring two applications of current and producing gruesome scenes, sparking an immediate public controversy about whether electricity was a humane method of execution or a new form of cruelty.

The electric chair, which transformed electricity from a symbol of enlightenment and progress into an instrument of state power and death, had a profound and unsettling effect on American literary culture. The dark irony of using the same force that lit cities to extinguish human life resonated through American literature, from the Gothic sensibilities of Edgar Allan Poe's successors to the prison literature of the twentieth century. The electric chair became a recurring symbol in American poetry and fiction, representing technology's capacity for both creation and destruction, a duality at the heart of the American experience of industrial modernity.