Jeanette Vanausdall. Pride and Protest: The Novel in Indiana. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1999. xviii + l69 pp. $27.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-87195-134-2. Reviewed by Ronald Weber Published on H-Indiana (June, 2000) Indiana's contribution to enduring American Willa Cather, O. E. Rolvaag, Sherwood Anderson, fiction comes down to a major place for Theodore and Sinclair Lewis. With the large exception of Dreiser and a footnote for Booth Tarkington. Dreiser and some wiggle-room for Tarkington, In‐ Jeanette Vanausdall doesn't shrink from this reck‐ diana writers shunned realism and its cousin, nat‐ oning, which gives her book high marks among uralism, in favor of two particularly syrupy historical accounts devoted to the literature of a strains of romanticism -- historical costume dra‐ single state. She doesn't wish to be an uncritical ma and nostalgic treatments of a lost Eden of ru‐ booster of Indiana writing, but neither does she ral innocence. For a time around the turn of the wish to be a grim debunker. Her chosen place is century the Indiana romancers seemed to rule the somewhere in between, meaning that she wants day, but with the reissue of Dreiser's Sister Carrie to show -- as she puts it -- how Indiana writers "fit in l907, the game was essentially over. The ro‐ within the broader context of American litera‐ mances would slide into obscurity and Dreiser, ture, which should be a source of pride." who for fctional material turned his attention to After Dreiser and Tarkington the pride stems the brawling new urban worlds of Chicago and largely from the dominance of Indiana writers in New York, would remain as Indiana's undisputed popular American writing in the period roughly claim to literary fame. from the l870s to the l920s -- among them, Edward All this Jeanette Vanausdall knows, giving Eggleston, James Whitcomb Riley, Maurice Dreiser his literary due and treating the parade of Thompson, Lew Wallace, Meredith Nicholson, Indiana romancers as deserving of historical in‐ George Barr McCutcheon, and Gene Stratton- terest only. The fnal two chapters of her book at‐ Porter. This was likewise the period of the fresh tempt to bring Indiana writing more or less up to winds of realism in American fction and poetry date with a discussion of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s, coming out of the Middle West -- the age of Ham‐ one-time blockbuster Raintree County and the en‐ lin Garland, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, during work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Such contempo‐ H-Net Reviews rary Indiana writers as Scott Russell Sanders and Michael Martone come in for cursory attention. But the primary focus of the book is on Indiana's past in literature, not its present, and here Pride and Protest offers a clear, sensible, economical ac‐ count. Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights re‐ served. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the au‐ thor and the list. For other permission, please con‐ tact [email protected]. If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-indiana Citation: Ronald Weber. Review of Vanausdall, Jeanette. Pride and Protest: The Novel in Indiana. H- Indiana, H-Net Reviews. June, 2000. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4174 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2.