The first three decades of the twentieth century saw the largest
period of immigration in U.S. history. This immigration, however,
was accompanied by legal segregation, racial exclusionism, and
questions of residents’ national loyalty and commitment to a shared
set of \u201cAmerican\u201d beliefs and identity. The faulty
premise that homogeneity—as the symbol of the \u201cmelting
pot\u201d—was the mark of a strong nation underlined nativist
beliefs while undercutting the rich diversity of cultures and
lifeways of the population. Though many authors of the time have
been viewed through this nativist lens, several texts do indeed
contain an array of pluralist themes of society and culture that
contradict nativist orientations. In The Pluralist
Imagination from East to West in American Literature, Julianne
Newmark brings urban northeastern, western, southwestern, and
Native American literature into debates about pluralism and
national belonging and thereby uncovers new concepts of American
identity based on sociohistorical environments. Newmark explores
themes of plurality and place as a reaction to nativism in the
writings of Louis Adamic, Konrad Bercovici, Abraham Cahan, Willa
Cather, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Alexander Eastman, James
Weldon Johnson, D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Zitkala-Ša,
among others. This exploration of the connection between concepts
of place and pluralist communities reveals how mutual experiences
of place can offer more constructive forms of community than just
discussions of nationalism, belonging, and borders.