How did American small towns stop being great? One answer is found in literature: cities have always played a central role in the bildungsroman , or coming-of-age story. Literary protagonists quickly mature when released into frenetic urban spaces where their moxie is tested. Most fail spectacularly: Candide reaches Lisbon only to see it crumble in a giant earthquake, Jo March travels to New York with bold dreams of independence but is recalled home to care for her dying sister, and Holden Caulfield pictures Manhattan as his fresh start only to sulk around collecting romantic misadventures.
Nonetheless, the city represents openness, with adolescents growing into adulthood among a multitude of interactions. Conversely, the small town—every bildungsroman reveals—is a dungeon, where the potential for personal development goes unfulfilled. The book is a corrective to previous novels that depicted rural American life as an honorable struggle among kindhearted folk, expunging colonial slaughter, forced labor, casual violence, and lamentable opportunities for women. Basically, Main Street overturns the tendency to make frontier development all Little House on the Prairie with no Deadwood.
The book is an anti- bildungsroman: a tale not of progressive growth but of progressive confinement. Of course, the protagonist who gets trapped is, by no accident, a woman. Unlike a traditional bildungsroman, Main Street is about forsaking adventure for tedious existence. It is the story of the incomplete progress of a woman who, though afforded a college education, is thrust back into domesticity.
It chronicles a society that has outgrown itself in terms of size and power, but has been slow to develop culturally or intellectually. But it still stung for Americans of the s, who felt more assured after helping to win World War I but still provincial in comparison to Europeans.
Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors. Main Street is a denunciation of a provincial Minnesota town, appropriately dubbed Gopher Prairie.
Lewis, writing from Greenwich Village, was himself an apostate provincial Gopher Prairie is a thinly veiled caricature of his birthplace: Sauk Centre, Minnesota. The book concentrates on Carol Kennicott, a native of the Twin Cities who is lured to small-town life by her husband, a doctor, who misses his native Gopher Prairie.
Three days later I got the following letter from Mencken, who had returned to Baltimore:. Dear George: Grab hold of the bar-rail, steady yourself, and prepare yourself for a terrible shock! Get it as soon as you can and take a look. There is no justice in the world.
Yours in Xt. The boom began with three prepublication encomiums from F. He is right to a degree that is deeper than phonographic exactness. The other part was Will Kennicott, the downright.
The struggle was between the halves of his divided being. The two stories together are his, and the combination of these qualities, his, too. Sinclair Lewis was now beyond poverty and for the time being was feeling no pain. He could now, when he wished, control his native brashness, gaucherie, and social clumsiness.
He had now, when he wished to exercise them, charm and graciousness. His talk could be entrancingly and, finally, exhaustingly lively; and his impersonations entertaining and, presently, tiresome—his talk, for he had no conversation. His mind could not stay with an idea any longer than his body could stay in a chair, but leapt from point to point, from sense to extravagance, from the mundane to the earnest to the arch to the whimsical to the fantastic and, at last, to the boring, the irrelevant, the merely demanding.
When he was at home alone or with his family, he slouched around in carpet slippers and an old bathrobe or a tattered cardigan; but he also had developed starched notions of elegance which made him conspicuously well dressed when he dressed. He was briefly tolerant of many people and sharply impatient, trigger-tempered, with a few—those closest to him.
His wife annoyed him almost all the time; but at this point, although frequent short periods of freedom were essential, he could not yet conceive of living for long without her. His son did not interest him, and when the child required attention that the father thought might better be paid to himself, the little boy was a simple nuisance at least, or an object that aroused a petulant jealousy. He drank, but not yet in excess, or at least not often.
He could be as delightful as he was distraught. Except for a few weeks of mild and unnecessary economic anxiety just before and after the publication of Main Street , he would never be poor again. He was well-launched at last, the great lover of Thoreau, upon his life of noisy desperation.
Reports vary on his response to his sudden success. Peyton Rous and his wife, who were seeing the Lewises in these years, remember that it frightened him. This will change me. This will change everything! Later, surely, except for one brief moment, he took his success lightly, quite as his due, beyond astonishment.
At another extreme are stories of arrogance and a new accession of rudeness. In Washington, where he was then living, society in that winter of —21 paid some attention to the Lewises, and one story has it—it is probably apocryphal, almost certainly heightened, but reported by John Marquand as current at that time—that one day Lewis waited on Mrs.
Bainbridge Colby, the wife of the new Secretary of State, at a moment when she was being briefed by the protocol man. Lewis, still gauche in many ways, did not particularly put her at ease, and she was already uneasy about the expectations of her conduct, more so in the presence of the protocol man. Lewis, I think Main Street is a very interesting book.
You are surely one of the most promising young writers in the United States. Lewis, too, became the subject of anecdotes. One story has it that on some occasion when she was introduced as Mrs.
Add to Bookshelf. Read An Excerpt. Mar 01, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Jul 29, ISBN Nov 01, ISBN Paperback —. Also in Modern Library Best Novels. Also by Sinclair Lewis. See all books by Sinclair Lewis. About Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature in , the first American novelist to be so honored. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Lucy Gayheart.
Willa Cather. The Folded Leaf. William Maxwell. An Albany Trio. William Kennedy. The Octopus. Frank Norris. Main Street is a novel by Sinclair Lewis that was first published in Read our full plot summary and analysis of Main Street , scene by scene break-downs, and more. See a complete list of the characters in Main Street and in-depth analyses of Carol Kennicott and Dr. Will Kennicott. Here's where you'll find analysis of the literary devices in Main Street , from the major themes to motifs, symbols, and more.
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