Whereas the primary scholarship on progressive reform and literature has focused on the New Deal, Edmunds returns to the Progressive Era, when reformers pushed a sentimental view of the domestic sphere to advance social policy interests. In contrast, modernist writers including Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Edna Ferber, Tillie Olsen, Nathanael West, and Flannery OConnor reacted by producing fiction that belied depictions of a sunny home front by evoking the darker undercurrents of family life.