Main Street (Lewis)

Main Street
Sinclair Lewis, 1920
~400 pp. (varies by publisher)


Summary
Sinclair Lewis's barbed portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, shattered the myth of the American Middle West as God's Country and became a symbol of the cultural narrow-mindedness and smug complacency of small towns everywhere. At the center of the novel is Carol Kennicott, the wife of a town doctor, who dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community.

The range of reactions to Main Street when it was published in 1920 was extraordinary, reflecting the ambivalence in the novel itself and Lewis's own mixed feelings about his hometwon of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the prototype for Gopher Prairie. (From Penguin Signet Edition.)

More
Carol Milford is a liberal, free-spirited young woman, reared in the metropolis of Minneapolis. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart. When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Carol is appalled at the backwardness of Gopher Prairie. But her disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism compels her to reform it.

She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs, distributes literature, and holds parties to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her friendly, but ineffective efforts, she is constantly derided by the leading cliques. She finds comfort and companionship outside her social class. These companions are taken from her one by one.

In her unhappiness, Carol leaves her husband and moves for a time to Washington, D.C., but she eventually returns. Nevertheless, Carol does not feel defeated:

I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!

Carol is discontented with life in Gopher Prairie, but she finds that big city life also has disadvantages. In the end, she learns to settle with Gopher Prairie and accept it for what it is. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
• Birth—February 7, 1885
• Where—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
• Death—January 10, 1951
• Where—Rome, Italy; buried in Sauk Centre, Minn.
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Pulitizer Prize (he refused it)

Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and, at home, a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis' mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat popeyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13, he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War.

He entered Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners, and seemingly self-important loquacity did not make it any easier for him to win and keep friends at Yale than in Sauk Centre. Some of his crueler Yale classmates joked "that he was the only man in New Haven who could fart out of his face". Nevertheless, he did manage to initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After his graduation from Yale, Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication, and chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses (and for a time at the Carmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony), he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. At this time, he also earned money by selling plots to Jack London.

Novels
Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. In 1914 he married Grace Livingston Hegger, who was an editor at Vogue magazine. His first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Upon moving to Washington, DC, Lewis completed Main Street which was published on October 23, 1920. As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis's most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921 alone, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years sales were estimated at two million. According to Richard Lingeman "Main Street earned Sinclair Lewis about three million current [2002] dollars."

He followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Zenith, Winnemac, a setting Lewis would return to in future novels.

Lewis' success in the 1920s continued with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about an idealistic doctor which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which he refused). The controversial Elmer Gantry (1927), which exposed the hypocrisy of hysterical evangelicalism, was denounced by religious leaders and was banned in some U.S. cities. He divorced his first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, in 1925, and married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist, on May 14, 1928. Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society leading essentially pointless lives in spite of their great wealth and advantages.

Middle-Late Years
In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in his first year of nomination. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, he praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that...

in America most of us—not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.... [America] is the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.

After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis published nine more novels in his lifetime, the best remembered being It Can't Happen Here, a novel about the election of a fascist U.S. President.

Lewis died in Rome at the age of 65, from advanced alcoholism and his cremated remains were buried in Sauk Centre. A final novel, World So Wide, was published posthumously. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Three major characteristics define Lewis's work: detail, satire, and realism. Lewis remarkably portrays ordinary life, ordinary characters, and ordinary speech. Many critics...praised Lewis for his ability to meticulously reproduce different dialects and speech. Lewis used vivid detail to create scenes of the American middle class. His social satire was critical of American life and certain types of Americans and institutions which he felt harmed Americans and prevented the country from living up to its democratic ideals.

Lewis's novels fit under the umbrella of American social fiction, whose primary purpose is to represent contemporary American society, primarily in a realist style with realistic language. Lewis artfully described American culture and life of the time, helping Americans see their own lives with their many flaws. Critics praised him, claiming that his writing represented the culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Mark Schorer, in his exhaustive biography, notes regarding Lewis's work:

American culture seems always to have had a literary spokesman, a single writer who presented American culture and American attitudes toward its culture, to the world" (270).

Lewis was that author. The titles of two of his novels, Main Street and Babbitt, were introduced into the American vocabulary. These words developed their own cultural meanings.
Sinclair Lewis Society

Main Street, which Mr. Sinclair Lewis's novel of that title has made a synonym for spiritual stagnation, is not merely the epitome of our Middle Western civilization. Nor are the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie characteristic of any one country alone, nor of any particular age. There have always been Main Streets—everywhere—and the make-up of the men and women who have lived along them has never fundamentally changed with time or place.
C. Edward Morris - New York Times (1/10/1921)

Main Street bored me to extinction. I hated it as one hates stale bread seven days a week.... [The book's] lack of style hurts at every step.... It's capacity for minuteness, plus a lumbering style, makes such a reader feel is if he were watching an elephant with a teacup—you're afraid he'll break it and you wish he would, in order to end a nerve-irritating performance.
Catherine Beach Ely - New York Times (5/8/1921)

In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them.
Lewis Mumford

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Main Street

1. In his time, Lewis was attacked for breaking-down the abiding American myth of small-town wholesomeness. Lewis painted small-town life as narrow, provincial, and suffocating. Was that a fair assessment back then, do you think? Is it a fair assessment today? Does today's technology—in travel and telecommunications—make a difference? Consider this question particularly in light of today's political climate of red-state, blue-state—amidst claims of heartland "values" vs. East-West Coast "elitism."

2. What is Carol's first impression of Gopher Prairie? Find the passage in which she first sees the town and talk about Lewis's attention to detail.

3. What does Carol's long-deceased father mean for her and for the subsequent events of the story? Think about, especially, how she sees her father in Erik.

4. Talk about both the Jolly Seventeen and the Thanatopsis Club.  What is the raison d'etre of each group and what is lewis's point of satire?  How do the women view Carol...and why doesn't she fit in?

5 How does Carol attempt to escape the boredom and narrowness of Gopher Prairie? Do you find her a sympathetic character? What about Kinnecott?

6. Is Carol's budding friendship with Erik a threat to her or a boon?

7. Talk about the difference between Carol's and Vida Sherwin's approaches to getting things accomplished.

8. Why does Carol give up life in Washington and return to Gopher Prairie?

9. Is the ending resolved or unresolved? Is Carol defeated by Gopher Prairie? Will she prevail in her idealism? Or has she learned something from her time in Washington? Will speaks the novel's last lines. Why? Is Lewis, perhaps, suggesting that his common-sense is a more preferred approach to life? Or a blending of both common-sense and idealism?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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