Summary: Investigating the trope of gamblers in the realist novels Pudd'nhead Wilson, The House of Mirth, and The Great Gatsby, this dissertation demonstrates that, at the turn of the twentieth century, proper economic practice determined individuals' ability to constitute themselves as proper citizens of the United States. Gamblers reveal this economic logic of citizenship by troubling it: their traffic in chance is at odds with rational forms of accumulation. These newly inflected economic definitions of citizenship underwrote a legal discourse based on the Fourteenth Amendment's codification of citizenship through a property relationship: slaves were made citizens by being made owners of their own labor. The Amendment also codified the individual's relationship to the nation through his relationship to himself: the citizen owned himself. Reading this legal history alongside literary narratives that stage the relationship between gambling and citizenship, this project argues that this economic idea of self-ownership developed into a notion of self-control or self-possession that brought together the psychic and the economic in the formation of the "proper" citizen. This transformation of self-ownership into self-possession enabled discrimination against those thought not to be fully self-possessed, who could consequently be excluded from the full rights of citizenship. Ironically, then, it was the very guarantees of citizenship codified by the Fourteenth Amendment that enabled some Americans to be denied their full enjoyment of those rights.