This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century in which the writer, literary theorist, and activist Hamlin Garland lived in Chicago, he made great efforts to make the city the center of American literature. While later readers categorized his work simply as Midwest regionalism, Garland believed that regionalist literatures constituted global avant-gardes and that developing regional literary centers would lead to a transformation of literary value. This chapter surveys Garland’s work across thirty years, examining his theory of literary localism, his investment in developing the Chicago literary and artistic world, his changing vision of the American West, and his deflected relationship to early American modernism. In addition to his most famous writings, Main-Travelled Roads and Crumbling Idols, the chapter discusses less well-known works including The Land of the Straddle-Bug, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, his writings on Alaskan mining and Native American reservations, and his biography of U. S. Grant. It also explores his affiliations with Chicago personalities including Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, and the influential Chicago magazines the Chap-Book and Poetry.