Although Joseph Kirkland did not have his first novel published until he was fifty-seven and died seven years later after having produced two lesser novels, he, like his contemporary Edgar Watson Howe, was extremely influential in the development of the literature that came out of Chicago and the Midwest in the early years of this century and redirected the course of American literature. His Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (1887), together with Howe's one significant novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), introduced the subject matter, the techniques, and the attitudes that were to find their culmination in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) two generations later. While Anderson and Lewis were products of the Midwestern small town in the late decades of the nineteenth century after the Old Northwestern frontier had given way to order, stability, and a new respectability, Kirkland was a...