Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Dotting the highways and back roads of the American panorama are the remains of what is commonly regarded as “small-town America.” These obscure communities, their main streets, and the people who populate them present an intriguing paradox in the pursuit of understanding the evolution of American culture in the twentieth century. Recently, small towns and their place in society have become increasingly relevant as scholars and citizens have sought to understand and preserve them in the new millennium. However, critical questions persist in the current discussion involving the American small town: To what degree has popular perception affected collective attitude toward small towns? Who constructed the small-town American ideal, and when juxtaposed with the less-than-ideal qualitative reality emerging in the 1960s, what can we learn from it? Exploring these bigger questions is the beginning of an important journey to uncover hidden meaning within small-town communities and broaden our understanding of the diverse and intricate American identity. While comparing examples of how small towns are portrayed using fine art and literature and contrasting them with observable evidence of the declining state of the small-town community, this paper offers a response to the broader idea of perception’s effect on the emotional construction of the bucolic Main Street and the simultaneous masking of the convoluted reality that is the small-town living experience. I argue that nostalgic romanticism for the small-town ideal has historically overshadowed the crumbling state of these communities, furthering our complex relationship with small towns in the twenty-first century.