In the early twentieth century, the United States was becoming an urban society. By 1920, life outside the metropolis seemed sufficiently remarkable to warrant sociological investigation — or at least, city people thought so. Presented here are three views of rural and small-town America, all published during the 1920s. Though cities had become the wellspring of American intellectual life, urban writers juxtaposed their own experiences with those of people they thought of as living in “Middletown, U.S.A.”

Sinclair Lewis

Main Street

In his novel Main Street (1920), Sinclair Lewis portrayed the fictional midwestern town of Gopher Prairie. In the excerpts below, Lewis’s narrator describes the reactions of young, urban Carol Kennicott, wife of the town’s new doctor, and Bea Sorenson, a Swedish American farm girl.

When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.

Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows. …

She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer.

She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego.

Dyer’s Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade. Pawed-over heaps of toothbrushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow packages — nostrums for consumption, for “women’s diseases” — notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions.

The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson.

Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to “go get a yob as a hired girl in Gopher Prairie.” …

Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants.

As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn’t hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash). And the stores! … A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and all lovely marble … and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves, and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of. Suppose a fella took you there!

Anzia Yezierska

Bread Givers

A child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Anzia Yezierska grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City. In her autobiographical novel Bread Givers (1925), Yezierska described her arrival in the Ohio town where she attended college.

Before this, New York was all of America to me. But now I came to a town of quiet streets, shaded with green trees. No crowds, no tenements. No hurrying noise to beat the race of the hours. Only a leisured quietness whispered in the air: Peace. …

Each house had its own green grass in front, its own free space all around, and it faced the street with the calm security of being owned for generations, and not rented by the month from a landlord. In the early twilight, it was like a picture out of fairyland to see people sitting on their porches, lazily swinging in their hammocks, or watering their own growing flowers.

So these are the real Americans, I thought, thrilled by the lean, straight bearing of the passers-by. They had none of that terrible fight for bread and rent that I always saw in the New York people’s eyes. … All the young people I had ever seen were shut up in factories. But here were young girls and young men enjoying life, free from the worry for a living. … The spick-and-span cleanliness of these people! It smelled from them, the soap and the bathing. Their fingernails so white and pink. … What a feast of happenings each day of college was to those other students. Societies, dances, letters from home, packages of food, midnight spreads and even birthday parties. I never knew that there were people glad enough of life to celebrate the day they were born.

Source: From Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. Copyright © 1970 by Louise Levitas Henriksen. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd

Middletown

In 1929, sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd published Middletown, a study of life in a small midwestern city. Middletown was not a single community but a composite of several communities studied by the Lynds.

The first real automobile appeared in Middletown in 1900. … At the close of 1923 there were 6,221 passenger cars in the city, one for every 6.1 persons, or roughly two for every three families. … As, at the turn of the century, business class people began to feel apologetic if they did not have a telephone, so ownership of an automobile has now reached the point of being an accepted essential of normal living. …

According to an officer of a Middletown automobile financing company, 75 to 90 percent of the cars purchased locally are bought on time payment, and a working man earning $35.00 a week frequently plans to use one week’s pay each month as payment for his car. The automobile has apparently unsettled the habit of careful saving for some families. …“I’ll go without food before I’ll see us give up the car,” said one woman emphatically. …

Many families feel that an automobile is justified as an agency holding the family group together. … [But] the fact that 348 boys and 382 girls in the three upper years of the high school placed “use of the automobile” fifth and fourth respectively in a list of twelve possible sources of disagreement between them and their parents suggests that this may be an increasing decentralizing agent. …

If the automobile touches the rest of Middletown’s living at many points, it has revolutionized its leisure … making leisure-time enjoyment a regularly expected part of every day and week rather than an occasional event. … The frequency of movie attendance of high school boys and girls is about equal, business class families tend to go more often than do working class families, and children of both groups attend more often without their parents than do all the individuals or combinations of family members put together. … It is probable that time formerly spent in lodges, saloons, and unions is now being spent in part at the movies, at least occasionally with other members of the family. Like the automobile and radio, the movies [break] up leisure time into an individual, family, or small group affair.

Source: Excerpt from Middletown: A Study in American Culture, by Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd. Copyright © 1929 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1957 by Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.