S-Town, Small-Town Literature, and the Uses of Queerness

Abstract

[...]Reed claims that the final shape of the podcast is in part structured around his own journey, “just telling the story the way it happened to me” (Kilkenny). [...]Reed presents certain revelations—such as the fact that McLemore commits suicide or the exact nature of his sexuality (as Reed understands it)—as plot twists. Reed withholds the fact that McLemore commits suicide until “Chapter II,” and he delays discussion of McLemore’s sexuality until the final two chapters, although he offers clues earlier in the narrative. Because S-Town is novelistic, an analysis of comparable works will provide an important interpretive path for understanding Reed’s use of McLemore’s queerness. Small-town narratives typically depict the community in an age of transition. [...]the texts primarily identified with the Revolt from the Village—Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) , and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920)—were written at a moment when America was rapidly modernizing, and each text in its different way analyzes or contests this modernization.