goodness of small-town types as opposed to a metropolitan moneyed elite; unpretentiousness against pretentiousness, and littleness versus power." Conflict within the village itself plays no part in nostalgic romance; the village stands united—"one big family," in words used both by Tarkington and by Anderson and doubtless by many others—against the outside world. Zona Gale, perhaps the first to use the cloying term "togetherness" in speaking of village life, drew on images of solidarity firmly established by the turn of the century. Anderson likened villagers in his first novel, Poor White, to the "members of a great family," in a passage that also insisted on the timeless quality of village life that Wilder sought to capture in Our Town. A "kind of invisible roof" sheltered the inhabitants, according to Anderson. "Beneath the roof boys and girls were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed friendships with their fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love, married and became the fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened, and died." Sociologists objected to this theme of solidarity and "togetherness" more strenuously than to any other feature of the small-town myth; they uncovered sharp class divisions and showed that small-town politics were usually dominated by a handful of wealthy families. Studies of "social stratification," however, did not alter the impression of immobility. If anything, the static concept of "stratification" and the sociological division of small-town society into upper, middle, and lower classes reinforced this impression and precluded any discussion of the shifting relations among these social groupings. Whether it was perceived as united or as badly divided, the small town remained changeless, its story—alternately imagined as sociological and satirical or as pastoral and elegiac—essentially a record of vital statistics.

Notwithstanding its long career in literature and popular culture, nostalgia was not always known by that name. Until the twentieth century, the term was confined to medical usage and referred strictly to a condition of acute homesickness recognizable as such by well-defined physical symptoms : loss of appetite, irregular breathing and sighing, gastroenteritis.

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