Rachel Carson's pivotal book on ecology, Silent Spring (1962), was published in the same year as William Faulkner's final novel and William Melvin Kelley's first. Carson opens the text with a self-described ‘fable’ of American life:

Carson goes on to describe the ‘strange blight’ that ‘crept over the area’ and how ‘Some evil spell had settled on the community’. Carson ends her opening chapter, titled ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’, with an admission that she has constructed a synecdoche: ‘This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe.’ Carson chooses not to describe a real town that has suffered from unsustainable industrial practices because her point is better served by an amalgamated, representative construct. Carson puts her scientific fiction of an archetypal town to use as a warning to take action on ecological stewardship: ‘this imagined tragedy may easily become stark reality we all shall know.’ Carson was successful in instigating the change she wanted to effect with her writing, and Silent Spring led to the institution of bans on certain harmful pesticides for use in American farming. Crucial to Carson's extended metaphor of the town is the agricultural landscape that surrounds it. Silent Spring reflects on the inherent connectedness of the semi-urban community space of the small town and the agricultural industry that, literally and figuratively, feeds it.

Each of the towns I have mapped in Living Jim Crow is the centre of activity for a wider rural, agricultural economy. As sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1927, the American ‘country town’ exists in a symbiotic relationship to the neighbouring countryside: