There are two immortal imbecilities that I have no patience for.
The other one is the treatment of little towns as if they were
essentially different from big towns. Cities are not "Ninevehs" and
"Babylons" any more than little towns are Arcadias or Utopias. In fact
we are now unearthing plentiful evidence of what might have been safely
assumed, that Babylon never was a "Babylon" nor Nineveh a "Nineveh" in
the sense employed by poets and praters without number. Those old cities
were made up of assorted souls as good and as bad and as mixed as now.
They do small towns a grievous injustice who deny them restlessness,
vice, ostentation, cruelty; as they do cities a grievous injustice who
deny them simplicity, homeliness, friendship, and contentment. It is one
of those undeniable facts (which everybody denies) that a city is only a
lot of small towns put together. Its population is largely made up of
people who came from small towns and of people who go back to small
towns every evening.
A village is simply a quiet street in the big city of the world. Quaint,
sweet happenings take place in the avenues most thronged, and desperate
events come about in sleepy lanes. People are people, chance is chance.
My novels have mainly concerned themselves with New York, and I have
tried therein to publish bits of its life as they appear to such eyes
and such mind as I have. Though several of my short stories have been
published in single volumes, this is the first group to be issued. They
are all devoted to small-town people. In them I have sought the same end
as in the city novels: to be true to truth, to observe with sympathy and
explain with fidelity, to find the epic of a stranger's existence and
shape it for the eyes of strangers--to pass the throb of another heart
through my heart to your heart.
The scene of these stories lies pretty close to the core of these United
States, in the Middle West, in the valley of the Mississippi River. I
was born near that river and spent a good deal of my boyhood in it.
Though it would be unfair, false, and unkind to fasten these stories on
any definite originals, they are centered in the region about the small
city of Keokuk, Iowa, from which one can also see into Illinois, and
into Missouri, where I was born. Comic poets have found something comic
in the name of Keokuk, as in other town names in which the letter "K" is
prominent. Why "K" should be so humorous, I can't imagine. The name of
Keokuk, however, belonged to a splendid Indian chief who was friendly
to the early settlers and saved them from massacre. The monument over
his bones in the park, on the high bluff there, now commands one of the
noblest views in the world, a great lake formed in the Mississippi River
by a dam which is as beautiful as if the Greeks had built it. It was, in
fact, built by a thousand Greeks who camped there for years. As an
engineering achievement it rivals the Assouan dam and as a manufacturer
of electricity it is a second to Niagara Falls. But it has not yet
materially disturbed the rural quality of the country.
The scenery thereabout is very beautiful, but I guarantee you against
landscape in these stories. I cannot, however, guarantee that the
stories are even based on fact. Yet I hope that they are truth.
The characters are limited to a small neighborhood, but if they are not
also faithful to humanity in general, then, as we would say out there,
"I miss my guess."