Excerpt from Middletown
Published in 1929

In January 1924 a young couple arrived in Muncie, Indiana, with a special purpose in mind. They planned to conduct a study of religious life in this small town in the middle of the United States. By the time they were finished, though, the scope of their study had expanded. What they finally produced was a richly detailed portrait of how the residents of the place they called Middletown lived. The Lynds' published study gives contemporary readers a revealing peek into the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in the 1920s.

Robert and Helen Lynd had both been born and raised in the midwestern United States, but both were living on the East Coast when they met. At the time of their 1922 marriage, Helen was a schoolteacher and Robert a graduate student in...