Theodore Dreiser's descendants

Theodore Dreiser, popularized as one of America's earliest and best novelist of the "naturalist" school, wrote about the poor and the working class.

Yet, Dreiser's working class-poor were mostly people who left their homes in the American countryside, to have a better life in the cities.

The cities turned out to be hellish, rewarding the vicious, and punishing virtue.

In other words, Dreiser's world was a dichotomous one, with the countryside or small town America perceived as poor but golden, and the cities perceived as dens of corruption.

The 21st century descendents of Dreiser, seem not to care for such dichotomies. Characters in the stories of Frank Bill and Donald Ray Pollock, for instance, live in hell, and can't leave it because it doesn't occur to them to leave.

These hells are not imagined, but are located in the rural areas of the American Midwest. While Bill's hell is mostly in South Indiana, Pollock's is in Ohio. Violence, meth and ruthless poverty mark these places, and the lives of the people therein.  

As Craig Fehrman notes in a recent story, writers like Bill and Pollock, don't romanticize the Midwest, but depict them as they are. The title of Pollock's novel pretty much says that there has never been a "golden" era in the rural Midwest; it's always been hellish.

Fehrman names the emergent genre of fiction as "Country noir." 

Incidentally, both Bill and Pollock are natives of the places they write about and they are factory-workers who took up fiction writing at later ages. They aren't products of creative writing workshops.

While Bill was inspired by Chuck Palhanuik's The Fight Club, and decided to transpose masculine violence from the city to the country, he also makes masculine violence as a way of life in rural America, rather than as a fight back against emasculating forces of consumerism in the cities.