"My stridency was fortified by American literature’s constellation of small-town exiles. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson all wrote their best work after abandoning their small Midwestern hometowns. Only Cather opted for aria. Hemingway, typically, chose silence, not once writing about Oak Park, Illinois. Fitzgerald seemed to hold his Minnesota boyhood in a regard that is half sneering, half heartbroken. In MAIN STREET and BABBITT, Lewis horse-whipped America’s small towns so ferociously the latter has become synonymous with everything strangling and conformist about them. Anderson is the most influential small-town anatomist, his WINESBURG, OHIO famously coining the term “grotesques” for small-town people and inspiring what might best be called the “Up Yours, Winesburg” tradition in American literature."
--Tom Bissell, "Escanaba's Magic Hours"