Beginning with an overview of the debate over American women writers and the academic canon, this essay inventories four clusters of American women writers—domestic novelists, regionalists, modernists, and writers of diverse ethnicities—within a representative sampling of small-town public libraries across the Midwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The survey reveals som...

The ground-zero premise (so to speak) of the biological sciences is the assumption that survival and reproduction is the basic, continuing, inescapable problem for all living organisms; life is at bottom a “survival enterprise.” Whatever may be our perceptions, aspirations, or illusions, this tap-root assumption is applicable to the human species as well. Survival is the “paradigmatic problem” ...