From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 by Jon K. Lauck (review)

As a founder and guiding light of the Midwestern History Association, Jon K. Lauck has led the struggle to renew interest in the study of America's heartland. He struck a strong blow in The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History, published in 2013. Now he has advanced his campaign in From Warm Center to Ragged Edge. In this work, he attempts to explain the marginalization of the Midwest in the fields of literature and history. Whereas in 1920 the Midwest was at the warm center of attention among literary figures and American historians, by 1965 it was at the ragged edge, a flyover region neglected, and too often disparaged, by the bicoastal elite. According to Lauck, it is time to reverse course and seriously reexamine the heartland.

Lauck launches his argument by reviewing the myth of the revolt from the village, which dates from a 1921 essay by Carl Van Doren. Citing the work of midwesterners Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Van Doren emphasized the new strain of cynicism and negativism in literary representations of the heartland's small towns. Spoon River Anthology, Winesburg, Ohio, and Main Street each exposed the narrowness, hypocrisy, and repressive nature of small-town midwestern existence, revealing the dark side of the village. East Coast literary critics embraced this supposed revolt, promoting a new image of the Midwest as a benighted region of bigots, backbiters, and Bible thumpers.

Lauck correctly takes exception to the intellectually fashionable revolt thesis. Most notably, he makes clear that Masters, Anderson, Lewis, and Fitzgerald were neither Midwest haters nor uncompromising critics of small-town and rural life. To pigeonhole them in the revolt category was a misrepresentation that reflected the biases of East Coast intellectuals.

Moreover, Lauck identifies another strain in the regional literature of the 1920s and 1930s that he characterizes as a revolt against the revolt. A large body of midwestern literature rejected the negativism of the revolt thesis and instead embraced a more sympathetic view of the region. In 1915 John T. Frederick of the University of Iowa launched the Midland, a journal seeking to give a voice to midwestern authors who expressed more affirming views of the nation's heartland. Among those who published in the Midland was Ruth Suckow, a too often neglected Iowan whose work demonstrated that Iowa grew not only tall corn but also towering literary talent. Other authors who countered the revolt thesis were Iowans Herbert Quick and Jay Sigmund, Nebraskan Bess Streeter Aldrich, and Wisconsinite August Derleth. They did not abandon the Midwest for Greenwich Village but remained in their home territory and celebrated their roots, native landscape, and neighbors.

According to Lauck, their voices, however, were doomed to dismissal as the nation's predominant social and cultural forces were incompatible with a literature of hardworking, neighborly farmers and villagers. Left-wing literary critics were not sympathetic to the independent yeoman or small-town Methodist. Accelerating urbanization meant that fewer critics and readers were interested in what transpired on the farm or in some "hick" town. In the wake of World War II, a new internationalist outlook prevailed, rendering the traditionally isolationist Midwest as out of touch with what was important.

These same forces undermined continued study of midwestern history. When the University of Wisconsin's Frederick Jackson Turner announced his frontier thesis in 1893, he put the Midwest at the center of American history. He and his followers deemed the Midwest the valley of democracy, the womb of American politics and the American character. Through the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, midwestern historians kept alive interest in this seemingly all-important region. Yet a new generation of historians in the post–World War II years turned away from this regional focus, and in 1965 the Mississippi Valley Historical...