From Warm Center to Ragged Edge

“From Warm Center to Ragged Edge is a long overdue defense and celebration of midwestern literature, culture, and history against the starchy criticism of eastern elites. Jon Lauck has produced a robust and scholarly work that made me want to cheer again the enduring prose of Sinclair Lewis, the informed defense of Stuart Pratt Sherman, and the timeless portrait of Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. My own prairie roots have served me well in the intellectual and concrete canyons of the eastern seaboard and it is good to be reminded why.”—Tom Brokaw

“During the first years of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 1918 to 1929, eight of eleven of the writers honored were midwesterners. One, Booth Tarkington, won twice. Jon Lauck documents the response of major eastern critics of the period to this extraordinary cultural flowering—that it was all an attack on the barrenness of the culture of the Midwest. The consensus that formed around their view of this vast region persists, to the detriment of American history as a whole. Lauck has done valuable work in exposing the origins of an extraordinarily potent cliche.”—Marilynne Robinson, author, Gilead

“Jon Lauck’s learned survey of midwestern regionalism rebuts strident critics, recovers forgotten voices, and revitalizes our appreciation for regionalist perspectives. Read this book to engage with the midwestern past and to imagine a new midwestern history.”—Stephen Aron, author, The American West: A Very Short Introduction 

“In this lucid appraisal, Jon Lauck chronicles the silencing of the ‘rooted voices from the solid center’ of the nation, the American Midwest. A discerning intellectual history of the demise of regionalism in American letters, as well as an impassioned argument for the importance of local attachments in a global age.”—John Mack Faragher, Howard R. Lamar professor emeritus of history and American studies, Yale University