Small-Town Dreams: Stories of Midwestern Boys Who Shaped America

We live these days in a virtual nation of cities and celebrities, dreaming a small-town America rendered ever stranger by purveyors of nostalgia and dark visionaries from Sherwood Anderson to David Lynch. And yet it is the small town, that world of local character and neighborhood lore, that dreamed the America we know today—and the small-town boy, like those whose stories this book tells, who made it real.

In these life-stories, beginning in 1890 with frontier historian Frederick Jackson T...