The Midwest

“My god, I said, this is my country, but must my country go so far as Terre Haute or Whiting, go so far as Gary?"

William H. Gass, from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (2005)

Saul Bellow, from “Chicago and American Culture,” Chicago Guide 22 (May 1973)

Sinclair Lewis from Babbit (1922)

“[The delegates to the convention] met at the Union Station for the midnight train to Monarch. All of them… displayed celluloid buttons the size of dollars and lettered ‘We zoom for Zenith.’ The official delegates were magnificent with silver and magenta ribbons. Martin Lumsen’s little boy Willy carried a tasseled banner inscribed ‘Zenith the Zip City—Zeal, Zest and Zowie—1,000,000 in 1935.’ As the delegates arrived, not in taxicabs but in the family automobile driven by the oldest son or by Cousin Fred, they formed impromptu processions through the station waiting-room.”

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The setting used by Lewis for Babbit and several of his other satirical novels about the Midwest (Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth) is the fictional city of Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac. (Lewis reportedly decided to create a fictional locale after residents of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, his hometown, were upset with the town's portrayal in his first novel, Main Street.) As Lewis locates it in Arrowsmith (1925), “The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.” According to one scholar, Lewis once drew a map of Zenith and its surrounds; it was due east of Chicago and 17-1/2 miles from the Illinois border. The critic H. L. Mencken saw Winnemac as exemplifying the “standardized chain-store state” of the midwest.

The place setting for Babbit is thus only a typical Midwest town. As Mencken says, the places in Lewis’s satirical novels are really franchises, always the same wherever they are. Lewis said in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1930 (he was the first American to win the prize) that he declined to join the mass of his contemporaries, for whom “the glorification of everything American” was de rigueur. The name “Babbit” has come to signify a clueless booster and philistine.

The Midwest by Train

“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the show. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family name.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby, when Nick Carraway goes home to his and Fitzgerald’s native St. Paul

“We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

Willa Cather, from the introductory section of My Ántonia, during the narrator’s train ride across Iowa