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Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin kicked up a storm last year when she told a crowd that the real America lived in its small towns. Urbanites winced, pundits carped, and many residents in tiny town centers looked around to find that their main streets had been deserted for the mall. It’s no secret that the bustling civic life in countless small towns has faded.

For a series of lectures, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky dug into literature and films to reveal whether that real America ever really existed. He’s pulled those lectures together in a new book Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town.