“I want to write an article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa,” one woman told us, describing how the fabric of life in the Midwest had frayed since she was a girl on her grandparents’ farm. It was a good American subject, valuable as social history. But nobody can write a decent article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa; it would be all generalization and no humanity. The writer would have to write about one small town in Iowa and thereby tell her larger story, and even within that one town she would have to reduce her story still further: to one store, or one
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