The suburb has been an important setting and subject of the American novel since the 1920s, with its ascendance as the residential environment of choice for the white middle class. Until recently, the suburban novel has received little attention from literary scholars; analysis of canonical American literature has focused instead on the wilderness and the frontier, on the isolated landscapes and folkways that are the province of regionalism, and on the cities that ground realism and modernism as well as ethnic and African American writings. One of the earliest treatments of the suburb in literature established the terms on which it could be discounted. In “The Great American Novel” (1927), Edith Wharton lamented her fellow writers’ preoccupation with “the little suburban house at number one million and ten Volstead Avenue.” Wharton noted the “material advantages” such a house provided but deplored the spiritual and aesthetic deficiencies of “the safe and uniform life” found within it. A poor stimulus for “the artist's imagination,” it helped to foster the “middling,” “middle class” existence that writers purported to condemn. The suburban literary tradition has flourished in spite of Wharton's effort to derail it; indeed, her essay did not so much describe an existing literature as provide a blueprint for it. The suburban novel continues to privilege analysis and assessment and to focus on the banal, the mediocre, and the conventional, even as the suburbs themselves have radically changed.