Novels of the American Midwest - Page 2

If you only knew America through literary fiction, you could be forgiven for think that the Hudson River is the western border of the United States. But there have been plenty of great novels about the heartland, and not all of them depict its denizens as a gaggle of straw-chomping hayseeds. Sinclair Lewis' novels do, but he can be forgiven since he was from Minnesota and was satirizing his friends and neighbors. Many of his books, like "Babbitt" and "Elmer Gantry," take place in a fictional state called Winnemac, but when he describes its geography it seems to border every Great Lakes state, so they qualify as Midwestern literature.