Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
Summary
Carol Milford, an idealistic young librarian from the city, marries country doctor Will Kennicott and moves to the small Minnesota town of Gopher Prairie, certain she can bring culture and improvement to a place she finds drab and complacent. Lewis follows her campaigns, literary clubs, amateur theater, a new civic building, against the town's constant low grade derision, gossip that treats every one of her efforts as either laughable or faintly threatening to the town's settled way of doing things. Frustrated and increasingly restless in her marriage, Carol eventually leaves Gopher Prairie for Washington, D.C., taking a government job during the war years and tasting, briefly, an independent life outside her husband's town. She returns to Gopher Prairie in the end, not defeated exactly but recalibrated, telling herself and the reader that she may not have fought the good fight but has kept the faith, a settlement the novel leaves genuinely ambiguous between resignation and quiet endurance.
Lewis satirizes small town American conformity with a sharp, often savage wit, using Carol's frustrated ambitions to expose the gap between the nation's flattering self image and its actual provincial narrowness. The novel reads briskly for its length, propelled by Lewis's ear for exactly how small town gossip and civic boosterism sound out loud, and its satire lands with real precision because Lewis never lets Carol off the hook either, letting her own condescension toward the town be part of the joke.
Lewis set Gopher Prairie on his own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and the town has since embraced rather than resented the connection, its high school athletic teams adopting the nickname the Main Streeters as early as the 1925 to 1926 school year.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1921 Pulitzer jury actually recommended Main Street for the prize, but the Pulitzer board overturned that recommendation and awarded the fiction prize instead to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, judging Lewis's satire too harsh a portrait of American life to honor. The novel became the best selling work of fiction in America for 1921 according to Publishers Weekly regardless, and Harcourt, Brace and Howe's 1920 edition ran through repeated printings on the strength of readers rather than any award.
Lewis never forgot the reversal, and when the Pulitzer board later gave him the fiction prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, he refused to accept it, citing the treatment of Main Street directly. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, the first American writer honored with it, with the Nobel presentation dwelling on Main Street and Arrowsmith among his achievements. The Modern Library ranked Main Street 68th on its 1998 list of the century's best English language novels.