Friday Mood Recs: Nine and a half Midwestern novels with a sense of community and place
Because Midwestern lit deserves its moment in the sun
Last month I put out a request for newsletter ideas and you all delivered! (If you haven’t had a chance to submit a request, there’s still time.) One of the requests I got was for a list of Midwestern novels. I loved this idea so much! Way back when I taught American Literature, the teacher I split my prep with and I always wished we could organize our class geographically. Every year when it came time to plan and make curricular adjustments, we’d think and tweak and it just didn’t work. This was in part because the class was supposed to loosely mirror the history curriculum so chronological order made sense and partly because the class also involved teaching rhetoric and it just too much to fit it in.
But I really enjoy thinking about American Literature geographically, and I feel like Midwestern books get short shrift! We talk about Westerns, Southern Literature, and of course the New York novels, but large swaths of the country are missing from those categories. Many of the books I’ve read that are set in the Midwest feel singular—the landscape and community and sensibility are distinct. I’ve never lived in the Midwest, but I’ve done my best to gather a handful of books ranging from classic to contemporary that feel distinctly and importantly Midwestern.
