I guess you would have to say there is one great American bankruptcy novel. That would be William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). I’m hesitant because I find it unreadable: it’s too much high-minded Victorian social critic for me. Worse, perhaps, with Howells as with Dickens, I think he doesn’t understand the capitalist economy he is trying to criticize. Dickens saved himself with cyclonic energy and inventiveness. With
Howells, a more telling comparison is Trollope—perhaps no more
inventive or energetic a writer than Howells, but far better attuned to
his subject matter. Howells’ Indian Summer (lately resuscitated in the New York Review of Books Classics (link)) is a gentle romantic comedy that shows his skills to better advantage.

The
“Rise” of the title is, of course, a heavy-handed irony: Lapham falls
when he rises and rises as he falls, just as Oedipus can see only when
he is blind–perhaps this is the case also with Balzac’s grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau,, although the point is less stressed there. About
the best Howells can do with it is the conventional
good-man-in-a-bad-business model (the script cries out for Jimmy
Stewart):

Perhaps
because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps because
the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity for
emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a relief, a
repose to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh sensation of
calamity. In the shadow of his disaster they returned to something like
their old, united life; they were at least all together again; and it
will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with vicissitude,
that Lapham should come home the evening after he had given up
everything, to his creditors, and should sit down to his supper so
cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and tell him that
she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him a hundred
cents on every dollar he owed them. . . . 

All
those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and even
more than well, when it came to the worst. The prudence, the good
sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of
which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and
these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his
creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him;
this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They
gave him time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on
the old basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the
competition of the West Virginia company. He
saw himself that it was useless to try to go on in the old way, and he
preferred to go back and begin the world anew where he had first begun
it, in the hills at Lapham.

–W. D. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham 351-2 (Penguin Paperback ed. Reprinted 1985)

Sir, I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, get
that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s
happiness, glad of other men’s good, content
with my harm, and the greatest of my pride
is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.

Every
law professor believes that every other subject is a subset of his own.
I agree: there is a bankruptcy angle to everything.

Example:  I’ve been spending some happy hours with James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (link), in particular Shapiro’s instructive discussion of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Readers (and viewers) will remember this play as the one in which the
boys and girls all go to the woods and discover the equivocal ironies
of the pastoral life. But as Wood makes clear, there is a not-so-gentle
back-story rooted in Shakespeare’s own past, and in the world around
him.

Shakespeare calls his locale “The Forest of Arden.” It’s
fictional, but in fact, Shakespeare himself grew up in “The Forest of
Arden,”—more precisely, Shakespeare’s mother was
an “Arden,” and he spent a good deal of his own spare time trying to
traffick in his distinguished family connections. Shapiro expands on
the point:

Writing about [Arden] in As You Like It
must have stirred conflicting feelings in Shakespeare, for the play, in
its disorienting shifts between woodland and pastoral landscapes,
juxtaposes the romanticized Arden that stirred his imagination as a
child with the realistic Arden that Shakespeare, sharp observer of land
and people, witnessed as an adult. This helps explain the radically
different Arden settings in the play. Four scenes in the play are set
in the woods … the forest of ancient oak, streams, caves, and herds of
deer, of men dressed as outlaws and “the old Robin Hood of England”
(I.1.112). Twelve other scenes set in the Forest of Arden offer an
alternative landscape, a world of enclosure, of sheep and shepherds,
landlords and farmers, landed peasants and the less fortunate
wage-earners, where “green cornfield” and “acres of the rye” are now
established (5.3.17, 21)

Consider Corin the shepherd,
above. As Shapiro says, Shakespeare “could have represented [him as] a
successful tenant farmer who made a living tending to his landlord’s
sheep and tilling the land adjoining his rented cottage. What we get
instead is the grim fate, unexpected in a comedy, of a character so
impoverished that he can’t even feed or lodge his guests.

But I am shepherd to another man
And do not shear the fleeces that I graze:
My master is of churlish disposition
And little recks to find the way to heaven
By doing deeds of hospitality…

But the master, aside from being “churlish,” has his own problems:

Besides, his cote, his flocks and bounds of feed
Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now,
By reason of his absence, there is nothing
That you will feed on…

Indeed,
the offer of another character “to buy the farm and mend Corin’s wages
is the all that stands between him and the highway.”

Granted,
this is not, strictly speaking, a bankruptcy story—bankruptcy, for all
practical purposes, not yet having been invented. Still, Shapiro
continues:

Shakespeare knew that there were more Corins
around than ever before, left, as the historian Victor Skipp puts it,
“with no alternative but to take to the road and ultimately to die on
it.”

No flippancy here: another character faced with “vagrancy and hunger,” asks:

What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my food?
Or with a base and boist’rous sword enforce
A thievish living on the common road?

Fortunately, this is a comedy, so the fates are not so severe.

For lawyers, the big Dickens novel is supposed to be Bleak House, but for bankruptcy lawyers, I think the choice should be Little Dorrit. You
will remember: that is the one about William Dorrit, the “Father of the
Marshelsea,” famous for being famous, in debtor’s prison for longer
than anyone can remember.

But in fact, debt was a recurrent theme for Dickens; it pops up throughout his novels. Indeed,
perhaps the most famous Dickensian debtor is not William Dorrit but Mr.
Micawber, great friend of the eponymous author of David Copperfield.  Even people who have never cracked a Dickens novel will remember W. C. Fields saying   

Annual income twenty pounds,

annual expenditure

nineteen nineteen six,

result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds,

annual expenditure

twenty pounds ought and six,

result misery.

It’s
an imperishable scene and a priceless bit of character comedy but it
overlooks a hard fact: Micawber is a calamity. He’s a drifter and a
dreamer. He has a wife to support, and a disastrous knack for fathering children. David, first their tenant, becomes their protector, adult before his time. Micawber is always waiting for something to turn up. For
the most part, nothing does turn up; Micawber winds up in debtor’s
prison, and the best thing he can find to do with his time is to
compose “a petition to the House of Commons, praying for an alteration
in the law of imprisonment for debt.” Copperfield explains:      

There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a gentleman, was a great authority. Mr. Micawber had stated his idea of this petition to the club, and the club had strongly approved of the same. Wherefore
Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a
creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and
never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be
of any profit to him) set to work at the petition, invented it,
engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on a table.,
and appointed a time for all the club, and all within the walls if they
chose, to come up to his room and sign it. 

Dickens
readers apparently find this all touching and loveable: apparently the
book remains about the best-selling of all Dickens novels. It is not entirely clear just what Dickens himself thinks. It is he who sketches out all this sunny innocence; yet it is he who lays out the evidence that Micawber, for those around him, is pretty much of a train wreck. Dickens does also mention “the boot-maker” who

had declared in open court that he bore [Micawber] no malice, but that when money was owing to him he liked to be paid. He said he thought it was human nature. 

Human nature indeed. Compare with Micawber’s human nature at work as he undertakes to discharge an obligation to his young friend Traddles:

‘One thing more I have to do, before this separation is complete, and that is to perform an act of justice. My
friend Mr. Thomas Traddles has, on two several occasions, ‘put his
name,’ if I may use a common expression, to bills of exchange for my
accommodation. On the first occasion Mr. Thomas Traddles was left—let me say, in short, in the lurch. The fulfillment of the second has not yet arrived. The
amount of the first obligation,’ here Mr. Micawber carefully referred
to papers, ‘was, I believe, twenty-three, four, nine and a half; of the
second, according to my entry of that transactions, eighteen, six, two. These sums, united, make a total, if my calculation is correct, amounting to forty-one, ten, eleven and a half. My friend Copperfield will perhaps do me the favour to check that total?’

I did so and found it correct. 

‘To
leave this metropolis,’ said Mr. Micawber, ‘and my friend Mr. Thomas
Traddles, and I now hold in my hand, a document, which accomplishes the
desired object.  I beg to hand to my friend Mr.
Thomas Traddles my I O U for forty-one, ten, eleven and a half, and I
am happy to recover my moral dignity, and to know that I can once more
walk erect before my fellow man!’ 

With
this introduction (which greatly affected him), Mr. Micawber placed his
I O U in the hands of Traddles, and said he wished him will in every
relation of life. I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same
to Mr. Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly
knew the difference until he had time to think about it. 

 It’s
something to reflect that Micawber’s cheerful, calamitous innocence who
has more to do with public attitudes towards debt than any other
character in literature.

Fn.: Dickens never was much good at endings. After
carrying him through one scrape after another, there wasn’t much to do
with Micawber, so (in desperation?) Dickens sent him to the antipodes
and made him a judge. The reader is left to draw whatever moral he sees fit.

Well, hey.  thanks for the intro.    Now this:

I’ve always argued that bankruptcy law needs its Balzac, except that it
has its Balzac, and his name is Balzac. In a broad sense, you could say
that everything he wrote is about bankruptcy—or at least about
commerce, and usury, and rapacity, and greed, and wild speculation, and
all the things that made him Marx’s favorite novelist. He had
first-hand experience—it is said that he equipped his house with a
special back door, for the escape from creditors (he also took a
mistress more than 20 years his senior who was the mother of nine
children, go figure). He did write one explicit “bankruptcy” novel, Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, about a guileless parfumiere,
undone by an unworthy servant, but particular references are scattered
through any number of other novels. One of the best bits may be the
passage in Eugénie Grandet, where the Old Grandet, the miserly cooper, undertakes to de-besmirch the name of his late brother, the speculator and suicide:

Presently
des Grasssins called a meeting of creditors, who unanimously appointerd
the Saumur banker and François Keller, the head of a large business
firm and one of the principal creditors, as joint trustees; and
empowered them to do anything they thought necessary to prevent any
doubt being cast on the good name of the family, or the bills. The
credit Grandet of Saumur enjoyed, the hopes des Grassins roused in the
hearts of the creditors as his agent, made this go smoothly. There was
not a single dissident voice among the creditors. Nobody dreamed of
passing his bills to his profit and loss account, and each man said to
himself, ‘Grandet of Saumur will pay!’

Six months went by. The
Parisians had withdrawn the bills from circulation, and had put them
away underneath all their other business papers. This was the first
result the cooper was looking for. Nine months after the first meeting
the two trustees distributed forty-seven per cent of the amount owing
to each creditor. This sum had been raised by the sale of valuables,
property, goods and chattels belonging to the late Guillaume Grandet, a
sale made with most scrupulous honesty. The delighted creditors
acknowledged the undeniable and admirable integrity of the Grandet
brothers. Having praised them and circulated their praises for a
suitably decorous length of time, the creditors began to ask when the
remainder of their money would be forthcoming. It became necessary to
write a collective letter to Grandet.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said the old cooper, throwing the letter into the fire.  ‘Have patience, my little friends.’

In
reply to the propositions put forward in the letter, Grandet of Saumur
asked that all the documents involving claims against his late
brother’s estate should be deposited with a notary, together with
receipts for payments already made, in order, so he said, that the
accounts might be audited and to establish correctly just how much
money was owed by the estate.

This all goes on for another page or so.  Then:

Twenty-three
months after Guillaume Grandet’s death, many of the merchants, in the
rush of business life in Paris, had forgotten their claims against his
estate, or thought of them only to say,

‘I’m beginning to think that the forty-seven percent is all I’ll see of that debt.’

And so it goes.  Earlier, young Eugénie had asked the old cooper:  ‘What is a bankrupt, father?’

‘A
bankrupt,’ answered her father, ‘has committed the most dishonorable
deed that a man can dishonour his name by being guilty of. … A
bankrupt,’ he went on, ‘is a thief that the law unfortunately takes
under its protection.’