The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is a 1964 work of literary criticism written by Leo Marx and published by Oxford University Press.

[1] The title of the book refers to a trope in American literature representing the interruption of pastoral scenery by technology due to the industrialization of America during the 19th and 20th century.

Marx identifies a major theme in literature of the nineteenth century—the dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by machine technology.

"Within the lifetime of a single generation," Marx writes, "a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world's most productive industrial machine.

In Mark Twain's 1885 masterpiece, the garden is the raft, and the machine is the steamboat that smashes it apart—and along with it, the (impossible) dream of a free and independent existence for Huck and Jim.