Main Street, U.S.A.

Chapter 7 traces portrayals of small towns after 1945 in terms both nostalgic and ambivalent. While films like The Best Years of Their Lives (1946), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and Rebel without a Cause (1955) pitted placid surfaces against turbulent depths, nostalgia for small towns also congealed into the simulacra of Disneyland’s Main Street, USA, and open-air shopping malls, which in turn fueled high-brow critiques that echoed Van Doren’s “revolt.” Throughout, Masters’s tropes of populist, elite, and exile appeared in both ambivalent and nostalgic portrayals. By the end of the century, though the small town became untenable as a representative of the nation, Masters’s verse found a second life on Broadway and in secondary schools.