The Biggest Little City in the World

The Biggest Little City in the World is the slogan Georgiana sees on a sign across Reno’s main street, where it offers a grand public identity for a place that initially looks sparse, dusty, and far from grand.

Appearance in Reno

After the train leaves Georgiana and her mother on an empty platform, they take a taxi toward the lawyer Cy Goldman has found for her mother. In the town’s straggle of clapboard shacks and low brick buildings, they turn onto what seems to be the high street and encounter the sign advertising Reno as The Biggest Little City in the World.

Contrast and Effect

The slogan’s confident scale is undercut by Georgiana’s description of the settlement: a few buildings amid brown scrub, under intense heat and dust, with a mirage hanging over the track. Her mother likewise finds the place dreary and doubts she could endure six weeks there. The phrase therefore functions as civic promotion against an immediate, sharply less glamorous impression; the gap gives the arrival its wry tone and frames the town as an unlikely setting for the divorce plan.