Main Street

Main Street is the breakthrough novel of Sinclair Lewis, the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, published in 1920. Set in a small Midwestern American town around the First World War, the story follows Carol, a girl from an Eastern city, who after college marries the practical, conservative country doctor Kennicott and moves with him to Gopher Prairie on the Minnesota prairie. Filled with zeal to reform the town—to make it clean, open, and cultured—she finds the residents content with things as they are and hostile to any new idea. Her efforts meet repeated defeat; surveillance and slander follow, and even her marriage reaches an impasse. In her distress Carol goes alone to Washington, where she comes to see that what truly binds people is not a few opponents but deep-rooted, unexamined convention. Years later she returns to her husband and pins her hopes on a future not yet arrived. With abundant dialect, detail, and irony, Lewis turns the life of one small town into a miniature specimen of American society; Main Street caused great controversy upon publication, was reprinted many times within a year, and made "Main Street" a byword for conservatism, provincialism, and philistine mediocrity.