John E. Miller's many books include Governor Philip F. La Follette, the Wisconsin Progressives, and the New Deal; Looking for History on Highway 14, and, also from Kansas, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town: Where History and Literature Meet.
This book represents a new and imaginative reconception of the
American experience. . . . Especially noteworthy is the emphasis on
material culture.--David M. Katzman, author of Seven Days
a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing AmericaSmall
towns are an important part of Americana, not only because 30
million people live in them, but also because we hear so often that
they are the 'real America' where homespun virtue still prevails.
Miller's book unpacks that mythology, showing its manifestations in
the lives of small town boys who pulled themselves up by their
bootstraps and made good. I look forward to a sequel about small
town girls!--Robert Wuthnow, author of Small-Town America:
Finding Community, Shaping the FutureIn Small-Town Dreams John
Miller ably illustrates the importance of small towns in American
history and culture through a gallery of portraits of prominent
figures born and raised in them--all going to show you can take the
boy out of the town but not the town out of the boy.--Richard
Lingeman, Senior Editor of The Nation and author of Small Town
America and biographies of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair LewisThis
valuable and superbly written study of midwestern farm and
small-town boyhoods and subsequent careers will captivate hosts of
readers. The smell of corn and hogs, the sounds and silences of
hamlets and county seats, and schoolyard athletics, classroom
instruction, and theatrical presentation--all redolently here. A
first-rate regional study.--Richard W. Etulain, author of
Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction,
History, and Art
This book would make an excellent addition to collections that
focus on region and boyhood, as well as to collections with an
emphasis on twentieth-century American culture.--Great Plains
QuarterlyMiller has crafted an expertly researched, well-written,
and scholarly volume of biographies of twenty-two individuals whose
formative years were in the Midwest--Journal of Illinois HistoryThe
stories are well told and engagingly written, and the notion of
exploring the connection between America's small-town past and its
urban present is well worthwhile.--Michigan Historical ReviewA
deeply-researched and brilliantly-conceived account of the small
town experiences of a series of Midwesterners whose names many
over-50 readers will instantly recall.--Claremont Review of
Books[Miller] shows both the cultural shifts that have changed the
Midwest (and along with it, the nation) and the persistent, shaping
power of place on individuals and the national
consciousness.--Minnesota HistoryThe essays are well researched,
detailed, and strongly written to create a clear sense of the
effect that this peculiar sort of American place had on a given
man.--Annals of IowaIn a wonderfully readable compilation of
distinguished biographies. . . Miller documents the shifts that
emptied Main Street throughout the Midwest, . . . [with] the
stories of men whose childhoods were spent in the small towns all
of them left behind, but some of them never left spiritually.
Miller's Small-Town Dreams is a museum of big men from small
towns.--Books and Culture
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