Given the close historic association between Anglo-American modernism and New York City, critical engagement with novels about the Northeast tend to focus on those representations of modernity and the metropolis that purportedly revolted against local color fiction there. Influential literary critic Carl Van Doren praised young writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald for rejecting the stultifying provincialism of “Old Style” local color fiction by writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Pauline Hopkins, a post-1919 shift demarcated as the American novel's “New Style,” the unifying logic of which was its “revolt from the village” (173). This aesthetic of newness was predicated on a geographical shift from old New England to the Northeast's ascendant mecca of cosmopolitan modernism: New York. Usurping Boston as the functional central nervous system of the nation's cultural life, where the majority of writing, publishing, and circulation of high literature was said to occur, “New York publishes” America's decentralized literature, “criticizes it, and circulates it, but I doubt if New York society much reads it or cares for it,” and is thus not “the literary center that Boston once was, though a large number of our literary men live in or about it,” William Dean Howells lamented in 1902 (179). Literary culture thus became associated with the development of a cultural nationalism intended to replace local color's stultifying regionalisms by satirizing, ironizing, and ultimately rejecting small-town America. Its five boroughs accommodating a population of 7 million by 1930, eclipsing the birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago, with which incited white-supremacist terrorism in the nation's bloody summer of race riots in 1919; the anticommunism surrounding the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, including the incarceration and deportation of left-wing organizers; rising antisemitism and xenophobia, flames of hate that were fanned by anti-immigration policies directed at Irish, German, Italian, Russian, and Jewish migrants, i.e., those ethnic diasporas Wilson notoriously labeled the “hyphenated Americans”; and the growth of organized crime in response to Prohibition. Wartime patriotism buoyed Americanism but also perpetuated disillusionment in national politics within the production of youth culture, which was not exclusively metropolitan, but tended to be more accessible in densely populated areas.