"There has always been a disposition in some quarters to dismiss the Middle West as drab and uninteresting, and yet I think the Midwesterner especially typifies the American way of life." This opening sentence from Claude Gernade Bowers's autobiography suggests qualities of both his life and work. Revolutionary, shocking, and colorful he was not, but hard-working, patriotic, and popular he was in the extreme. Not self-righteously Yankee, not strictly Southern partisan, not radical, not profound, but diligent, orthodox, and supremely democratic, Bowers was the workingman's historian.

Bowers was born in 1878 in Indiana and his Hoosier background exercised an uncommon influence on his works. Born to Lewis and Juliet Bowers, Claude Gernade Bowers was a true son of his boyhood hometown of Whitestown, a community he once described as "overwhelmingly Democratic." His high-school diary is merely the first of his writings to reveal his ardor for democracy, and he...