"By the end of the nineteenth century, country towns had become charnel-houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs. State, county, and local news consisted of stories of resignation, failure, suicide, madness and grotesque eccentricity. Between 1900 and 1920, 30 per cent of the people who lived on farms left the land...
The people who left the land came to the cities not to get jobs, but to be free of them, not to get work but to be entertained, not to be masters but to be charges. They followed yellow brick roads to emerald cities presided over by imaginary wizards who would permit them to live in happy adolescence for the rest of their lives... It is this adolescent city culture, created out of the desperate needs and fantasies of people fleeing from the traps and tragedies of late nineteenth century country life, that still inspires us seventy years later."

-Michael Lesy,
Wisconsin Death Trip
(quoted in Was, by Geoff Ryman)