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Granville Hicks was one of America's most influential literary and social critics. Along with Malcolm Cowley, F. O. Matthiessen, Max Eastman, Alfred Kazin, and others, he shaped the cultural landscape of 20th-century America. In 1946 Hicks published Small Town, a portrait of life in the rural crossroads of Grafton, N.Y., where he had moved after being fired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for his left-wing political views. In this book, he combines a kind of hand-crafted ethnographic research with personal reflections on the qualities of small town life that were being threatened by spreading cities and suburbs. He eloquently tried to define the essential qualities of small town community life and to link them to the best features of American culture. The book sparked numerous articles and debates in a baby-boom America nervously on the move.Long out of print, this classic of cultural criticism speaks powerfully to a new generation seeking to reconnect with a sense of place in American life, both rural and urban. An unaffected, deeply felt portrait of one such place by one of the best American critics, it should find a new home as a vivid reminder of what we have lost-and what we might still be able to protect.

Prosperity reached Roxborough in the middle forties, but the town didn’t change much. People wore better clothes when they bothered to get dressed up, and there seemed to be more drinking, but it is hard to think of other changes. Of course war conditions prevented people from spending money in what might be characteristic ways—for new cars, for instance, or in travel, or on domestic improvements. But deeper than that, I feel sure, was a basic conservatism, a positive resistance to change. Whatever their income, the majority of natives had no intention of adopting city ways. As Roxborough’s old-timers

As I have said, nothing gives Roxborough greater satisfaction than a first-class scandal. Some five winters ago we kept hearing that various summer places had been broken into and pillaged. To begin with, gossip was chiefly occupied with the failure of the state police to halt this rural crime wave, but one snowy morning a neighbor phoned in great excitement to say that three boys, two of them local boys, had been arrested. That noon I heard talk of nothing else in the post office and the store. “I don’t know that I’m sorry for the boys,” an old-timer said,

The people of Roxborough frequently say—Stan Cutter with enthusiasm, most others with regret—that the town is going back to forest. It is one of the Roxborough stereotypes, this conviction that more and more houses will be abandoned and more and more land yielded to brush and woods. Yet most persons are planning their lives on the assumption that the town will remain unchanged, and there are even some optimists who predict a bright new era of prosperity. Has Roxborough a future? Has any small town a future in this age of industrialism, urbanism, and specialization? The problem of

The kind of socialism that I and my friends believed in back in the twenties rested on nineteenth century humanitarianism and a nineteenth century faith in the human intellect. We had been brought up to believe that a good society was a moral society, and the immorality of capitalism was apparent, we felt, to the most casual glance. But we did not despair at the sight of so much evil in the world, for we were sure that men had only to think about their problems in order to solve them. One of my professors used to argue that capitalism

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from our investigation of the mind of Roxborough, it is that universal compulsory education hasn’t been a great success. The testimony of the Sole Trustee of Common School District Number One is thus added to the lamentations, exhortations, and prescriptions of a host of weightier authorities. Most American institutions are currently subject to criticism, but in no profession or trade is self-criticism so prevalent as it is among teachers. To hear what is wrong with education, all one has to do is ask an educator. In my capacity as trustee, I am

Of his transposition from Brook Farm and Concord to the Salem Custom House Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “I took it in good part, at the hands of Providence, that I was thrown into a position so little akin to my past habits, and set myself seriously to gather from it whatever profit was to be had.” That is a note that runs through our literature, and it is the rare intellectual who has not at some time been flattered because he felt that he was being accepted as an equal by men of action, whether they were soldiers or sportsmen or