Rampant Yokelisms

Chapter 4 analyzes three types of citizen found in Spoon River Anthology: populist, elite, and exile. Each type eventually became familiar tropes in the mythological small town of the twentieth century. Masters reserved the perspective of the last type, the exile, for the reader of Spoon River Anthology, and characterized himself as the exile Webster Ford, a pseudonym he often used. Spoon River’s exiles invited readers to view the town from both nostalgic and ambivalent perspectives, thereby helping shape popular conceptions of small towns in twentieth-century popular culture in these terms.