The Midwest is the area of the United States consisting of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin; and Midwesterners are those people born and raised within these states.
A Midwesterner consists of many different traits, some which are standard American traits, and some which are unique to the immigrants that arrived and settled in the area. Author, John Hart describes Midwesterners as possessing the following characteristics:
All of these characteristics can be seen in some form or another in the books we read for this course. In the novel, Main Street, Carol was the epitome of self-assurance. She knew that she was better than everyone else in the small town of Gopher Prairie and tried to change everyone else to act and think as she did. In the novel, A Thousand Acres, Jess discusses his desire to change the form of farming, to use new technology to farm organically, therefore, he was portrayed as being technological and competent by the definitions above. On the other hand, Ty, in the same novel, was simplistic because he never probed too deeply into things; he accepted circumstances for their surface value and then moved on. And finally, all of the original townspeople in Gopher Prairie can be said to be Xenophobic since they did not want to trust nor accept Carol into their community. They were very suspicious of her at first, and especially later as she tried to reform them.
Charles Baxter, a former professor at the University of Michigan, described a Midwesterner as:
Another author, Willa Cather, describes her characters as having personalities that reflect the land around them. Jimmy describes his feelings about the place in which Midwestern pioneers live: