The Turmoil

A familiar midwestern novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, The Turmoil was the best-selling novel of 1915. It is set in a small, quiet city—never named but closely resembling the author’s hometown of Indianapolis—that is quickly being transformed into a bustling, money-making nest of competitors more or less overrun by “the worshippers of Bigness.”
“There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of...