Main Street [Paperback]

The first of Sinclair Lewis’s great successes,Main Streetshattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors, and—worst of all—the pettiness and bigotry of small-town minds.

Lewis’s portrayal of a marriage torn by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small-town America makeMain Streeta complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century American literature.Sinclair Lewiswas born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University in 1908. His college career was interrupted by various part-time occupations, including a period working at the Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair’s socialist experiment in New Jersey. He worked for some years as a free lance editor and journalist, during which time he published several minor novels. But with the publication ofMain Street(1920), which sold half a million copies, he achieved wide recognition. This was followed by the two novels considered by many to be his finest,Babbitt(1922) andArrowsmith(1925), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis. In 1930, followingElmer Gantry(1927) andDodsworth(1929), Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature. TlÖ