We live these days in a virtual nation of cities and celebrities,
dreaming a small-town America rendered ever stranger by purveyors
of nostalgia and dark visionaries from Sherwood Anderson to David
Lynch. And yet it is the small town, that world of local character
and neighborhood lore, that dreamed the America we know today--and
the small-town boy, like those whose stories this book tells, who
made it real.
In these life-stories, beginning in 1890 with frontier historian
Frederick Jackson Turner and moving up to the present with global
shopkeeper Sam Walton, a history of middle America unfolds, as
entrepreneurs and teachers like Henry Ford, George Washington
Carver, and Walt Disney; artists and entertainers like Thomas Hart
Benton, Grant Wood, Carl Sandburg, and Johnny Carson; political
figures like William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald
Reagan; and athletes like Bob Feller and John Wooden by turns
engender and illustrate the extraordinary cultural shifts that have
transformed the Midwest, and through the Midwest, the nation--and
the world.
Many of these men are familiar, icons even--Ford and Reagan,
certainly, Ernie Pyle, Sinclair Lewis, James Dean, and Lawrence
Welk--and others, like artists Oscar Micheaux and John Steuart
Curry, economist Alvin Hansen and composer Meredith Willson, less
so. But in their stories, as John E. Miller tells them, all appear
in a new light, unique in their backgrounds and accomplishments,
united only in the way their lives reveal the persisting, shaping
power of place, and particularly the Midwest, on the cultural
imagination and national consciousness.
In a thoroughly engaging style Miller introduces us to the
small-town Midwestern boys who became these all-American
characters, privileging us with insights that pierce the public
images of politicians and businessmen, thinkers and entertainers
alike. From the smell of the farm, the sounds and silences of
hamlets and county seats, the schoolyard athletics and classroom
instruction and theatrical performance, we follow these men to
their moments of inspiration, innovation, and fame, observing the
workings of the small-town past in their very different
relationships with the larger world. Their stories reveal in an
intimate way how profoundly childhood experiences shape personal
identity, and how deeply place figures in the mapping of thought,
belief, ambition, and life's course.
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