Today we hear from Jon Lauck, a Midwestern historian and the author, most recently, of "From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism."

The book get its title from a line in the first chapter of "The Great Gatsby." Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a Midwesterner who’s decided to go East to New York to learn the Bond business. He’s just returned to America from World War I, and notes that, “Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.”

That’s an attitude plenty of Midwesterners seem to take to their region of birth—at least, that’s one perspective about the Midwest we often encounter in American fiction and literary criticism. Jon Lauck’s book examines this trope, one might call it a cliché; as does Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, who says that Lauck’s book “exposes the origins of this extraordinarily potent cliché.” Robinson liked the book; so did other Midwesterners such as Tom Brokaw, who writes that his own prarie roots “roots have served me well in the intellectual and concrete canyons of the eastern seaboard and it is good to be reminded why.”