bound, watches Winesburg recede into the distance—"on which to paint the dreams of his manhood"? Was Hannibal a memory or merely an imaginative refuge from adulthood? Twain's books wavered between these two approaches; but Tom Sawyer, the most popular by all odds, was clearly written in the idyllic mode, and its commercial success practically guaranteed that as the unspoiled wilderness began to lose its imaginative resonance, the small town would replace it as the most evocative symbol of lost childhood.

However "poor" and "shabby," the small town of Tom Sawyer was "bright and fresh and brimming with life"—"dreamy, reposeful, and inviting." Dreamy the image of small-town childhood remained in all its subsequent evocations, dimly seen through the Indian summer haze of burning leaves, twilit evenings on the front porch, deeply shaded streets on a summer afternoon, or gently falling snow. From the early novels of Booth Tarkington and Zona Gale right down to the latest television commercials, village life retained its timeless appeal, and even its debunkers found it impossible to maintain a consistently satirical tone. The same Anderson whose Winesburg helped to set the fashion for unsparing exploration of the small town's seamy underside later wrote Home Town, which held up "thinking small" as an alternative to the "false bigness" of 1940— "men speaking at meetings, trying to move masses of other men, getting a big feeling in that way." The small town looked more attractive to Anderson now that the "big world outside" was "so filled with confusion." Sinclair Lewis, the daddy of debunkers, celebrated homespun horse sense in his novel of the mid-thirties, It Can't Happen Here, in which a country editor deflates an aspiring dictator.

Even Theodore Dreiser found the small-town myth intermittently appealing, reaffirming it in his attempt to disavow it. Having "seen Pittsburgh," he explained, he could no longer weave village "charms and sentiments" into an "elegy or an epic." A visit to his fiancée's Missouri homestead reawakened memories of his own boyhood in Indiana and "enraptured" him with the "spirit of rural America, its idealism, its dreams," its belief in "love and marriage and duty and other things which the idealistic American still clings to." But a writer who had lived in the larger world, Dreiser argued, could not hope to memorialize the American village.

In fact, of course, it was precisely the disillusioning view from "Pitts

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