Middle West US
Exploring Midwest History and Culture
Lingering over Midwestern Stories, in Midwestern Places, by Midwestern People
March 25, 2026
By Andy Oler
My introduction to the field of Midwestern literature centered on the fiction and poetry published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors typically considered Midwestern were mostly white, largely male, and often writing about rural or small-town life. James Shortridge has shown us that the idea of the Middle West came about at a time of rural modernization, allowing the region to project both a pastoral ideal and an image of growing industry. By exploring the socioeconomic and cultural shifts in different parts of the Midwest, authors like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather became the region’s exemplars, and when you add Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, James Whitcomb Riley, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and others, a stereotype begins to calcify.
While the white, male, and rural elements of this stereotype persist as key aspects of the Midwestern imaginary, it does not take much digging to understand that they are false…Read More
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“Here on the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West we can see a long way in many directions…Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, no iron conformity.”
-Adlai Stevenson