Too Good a Town: William Allen White, Community, and the Emerging Rhetoric of Middle America

For Fifty Years, William Allen White, first as a reporter and later as the long-time editor of the Emporia Gazette, wrote of his small town and its Mid-American values. By tailoring his writing to the emerging urban middle class of the early twentieth century, he won his "gospel of Emporia" a nationwide audience and left a lasting impact on the way America defines itself. Investigating White's life and his extensive writings, Edward Gale Agran explores the dynamic thought of one of America's best-read and most-respected social commentators. Agran shows clearly how White honed his style and transformed the myth of conquering the western frontier into what became the twentieth-century ideal of community building.