Bestselling authors like Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser portray the American Midwest as what Noe, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, describes as “full of nice, honest, wholesome people.” Her newest book titled, “The Innocent Midwest: Culture, Region, and Identity, 1793-1930,” however, dissects a history of the region that is much darker.