The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community

by Miles Orvell

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis.
Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Genres: Nonfiction

316 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2012

Reviews

[Taylor Prewitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half of the book, I'd give four stars. Exactly what I was looking for in terms of reading on the mythos of the small town. Second half is still interesting, but less so (to my personal tastes). Second half is more about neighborhood planning and how "main street" as an idea has influenced such planning.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable, somewhat selective tour through the iconography of "Main Street" in the US over the past century or so. Orvell spends a substantial--and worthwhile--amount of pages on Sinclair Lewis, Frank Capra, and the Lynds' Middletown books, but the heart of the project is clearly in analyzing the transformations of the Main Street ideal in the visionary/flawed housing projects flowing from the garden city utopias promoted by Lewis Mumford and assimilated (at quite a distance) by later New Urbanist developers.

[steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed The Death and Life of Main Street. Orvell builds upon much already written by the likes of Richard V. Francaviglia. There are hints of Gaston Bachelard as well. Orvell does not take the sentimental view of small towns always in decline, always disappearing off the face of the earth. He does not take a nostalgic view towards his topic, though he may start there. Nicely done, nicely academic. Enjoyable.