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.
Indeed, there’s very little digging involved at all. All we have to do is stick around, look about us, read and think through the stories that have been told about our places—our homes and schools and workplaces, our counties and cities and states, our region. When we spend time noticing, reading, and thinking, the variety and vitality of experience and storytelling become apparent.
Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest sets out to provide the space and time for Midwesterners to explore their stories as well as their places. Each of the 73 essays in this collection balance a piece of Midwestern literature, a site somehow related to that author or text, and the contributor’s experience of that place. The book defines “literature” capaciously, as the writing that circulates, informs, and reflects the cultural life of our region. Along with poetry, fiction, drama, and memoir, the book features oratory, legal writing, and abolitionist tracts. Combining this variety of literatures with the range of perspectives among the contributors—people of many ages, ethnicities, and sexualities, approaching the texts as literature professors, creative writers, historians, journalists, and more—results in a project that almost necessarily dismantles the stereotypes.
Not a single one of these contributors can tell the full story of the Midwest. But when we put them together, we begin to see a more complete picture. There are five clusters of essays: two on major cities Chicago and St. Louis and three on superlative Midwestern authors Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison. The book juxtaposes such prominent writers and places with lesser-known authors and out-of-the-way locations in part by organizing the essays according to their proximity, almost as if the reader is taking a road trip between them. Starting in western Nebraska, the Table of Contents moves east, then south, then north, then east and back west again. This is not the Midwest of Manifest Destiny, but a region that demands and rewards circulation (hat tip to Willam Cronon and Kristin L. Hoganson).
Lingering Inland invites readers to do just that—to linger, to move slowly among the essays and from one Midwestern place to the next, and to think beyond the book to their own versions of the stories that matter.
Andy Oler is the author of Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature and coeditor of Michigan Salvage: Approaches to the Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell. He is chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and departments editor at The New Territory. Lingering Inland is available from the University of Illinois Press.