Main Street

Main Street · published 1920 · ISBN 9780140189018

Sinclair Lewis — Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) — United States, writing in English. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930.

“for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Sinclair Lewis

American novelist and satirist who exposed complacency, consumerism, and conformity in middle-class life. Through Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and other novels, he created character types at once comic and disturbing; in 1930 he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

How it came to be

Lewis built Gopher Prairie out of his own home town, Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Published in 1920, the novel sold so extravagantly that it became a social event and turned "Main Street" into shorthand for provincial America. The 1921 Pulitzer jury chose it, only for the trustees of Columbia University to overrule them in favour of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence — a slight Lewis remembered long enough to refuse the Pulitzer awarded to Arrowsmith in 1926. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Summary of Main Street

Carol Milford, an eager young city librarian, marries the physician Will Kennicott and follows him to Gopher Prairie, a Minnesota town with exactly one main street. Convinced she can bring beauty and new ideas to the place, she tries theatre, women’s clubs, civic improvement — and runs each time into the comfortable self-satisfaction of neighbours who can see nothing in need of improving.

Analysis & legacy

What keeps Main Street alive past its moment as fashionable satire is that Lewis lets neither side win cleanly. Carol is right that Gopher Prairie is stifling, but she is also vain and quick to judge, and often more in love with the idea of reform than with the people she means to reform; the town, for all its inertia, holds a decency and endurance she cannot see. Lewis had an almost phonographic ear: the gossip, the recycled jokes, the confident empty English of the local lodges are transcribed to the point of cruelty. The ending is neither triumph nor complete surrender — Carol leaves and comes back, having learned that the fight against conformity is daily work rather than a battle won once. The book demolished the myth of the small town as the moral heart of America, and American fiction never quite put that myth back together.

Themes: Small-town America · Conformity · A woman’s ambition · Social satire · Disillusion

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Frequently asked questions

What is Main Street about?

Carol Milford, an eager young city librarian, marries the physician Will Kennicott and follows him to Gopher Prairie, a Minnesota town with exactly one main street. Convinced she can bring beauty and new ideas to the place, she tries theatre, women’s clubs, civic improvement — and runs each time…

Is Main Street worth reading?

What keeps Main Street alive past its moment as fashionable satire is that Lewis lets neither side win cleanly. Carol is right that Gopher Prairie is stifling, but she is also vain and quick to judge, and often more in love with the idea of reform than with the people she means to reform; the town,…

When did Sinclair Lewis win the Nobel Prize, and why?

Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930: “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters”

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