The Village Revolt

Chapter 6 traces Carl Van Doren’s claim in 1921 that Spoon River Anthology founded a literary “Revolt from the Village.” Van Doren argued that Midwestern authors inspired by Masters, such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, formed a literary movement that exposed the hypocritical underside of the United States through a critique of small-town America. The dissemination of this argument can be traced to intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, who popularized Freudian theory as a way to critique bourgeois mores and American capitalism. However, other popular authors, like William Allen White, celebrated Midwestern towns as ideal communities as a counter to these critiques. Thus, in the 1920s, a short-lived culture war arose around rival interpretations of Masters’s portrayal of American small towns.