Abstract
In the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans mythologized the New England village as a repository of abiding American values in reaction to anxiety over the growth of large Northeastern cities. During the same period, a rival myth located the representative American municipality in the Midwest. Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) popularized this rival myth in a collection of poems about a fictional Illinois town and helped reframe the representative American town in Midwestern terms for most of the twentieth century. By the late twentieth century, though the Midwestern small town ceased to be popularly conceived as representative of the nation as a whole, Masters’s book found a second life in American classrooms and on the stage.
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