The revolt from the village, 1915-1930

For years the myth of the "happy village" was perpetuated in song, verse, and prose in America, but in the 1880's and 1890's, a few writers began to see life differently. By 1915 a real "revolt from the village" was underway, and an organized literary attack on American provincialism and small-town mores preoccupied many of the well-known writers of the day--Willa Cather, Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken, Zona Gale, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Stribling, and Thomas Wolfe. Mr. Hilfer's judgments draw sympathetic attention to these writers who have often been unsympathetically and uncritically dismissed, and he reveals their intrinsic value and their contributions to American thought and feeling.--Book jacket.