Main Street is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920. Satirizing small-town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis's most famous book and led in part to his eventual 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The story is set in the small town of Gopher Prairie, a fictionalized version of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's hometown, during the 1910s. It relates the life and struggles of Carol Milford Kennicott, a self-made young woman with a strong personality, as she comes into conflict with the small-town mentality of the residents of Gopher Prairie. References are made to the start of World War I, the United States' entry into the war, and the years following its end, including the start of Prohibition in 1920.
Highly acclaimed upon publication, Main Street was turned into a play in 1921,[1] and a movie in 1923, the first by Warner Bros. studio. It remains a recognized American classic.[citation needed]
Plot
Carol Milford, the daughter of a judge, grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, and became an orphan in her teenage years. In college, she reads a book on village improvement in a sociology class and begins to dream of redesigning villages and towns. After college, she attends a library school in Chicago and is exposed to many radical ideas and lifestyles. She becomes a librarian in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the state capital, but finds the work unrewarding. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart.
When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his hometown of Gopher Prairie. Carol, filled with disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism, immediately formulates plans to remake Gopher Prairie.
She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs such as the Thanatopsis, distributes literature, and holds a party to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her efforts, these ventures are ineffective and she is constantly derided by the leading cliques.
She finds some comfort and companionship with a variety of social outsiders in the town, but these companions all fail to live up to her expectations.
After a political meeting of the Nonpartisan League is broken up by local authorities, Carol leaves her husband and moves for a time to Washington, D.C., to become a clerk in a wartime government agency. 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 Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith. (Chapter 39)
Reception
The book was a commercial success. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1921, according to Publishers Weekly.[2]
Some of Lewis's contemporaries said the novel was too bleak, even humorless, in its portrayal of ignorant small-town life and people.[3] However, Main Street is generally considered some of Lewis's most significant and enduring work, along with its 1922 successor Babbitt.[4]
Some small-town residents resented being portrayed this way, and the book was banned by the public library of Alexandria, Minnesota.[7]
Because Lewis and his book had become so popular, high-school sports teams from his hometown began to be called the Main Streeters as early as the 1925–26 school year. This name was essentially given to the town by the nearby towns at school events.[8] Sauk Centre High School teams still go by the name in a tribute to Lewis.
In 1930, Lewis was the first American ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. While a Nobel Prize is awarded to the author, not the work, and itself does not cite a particular work for which he was chosen, Main Street was Lewis' best-known work and enormously popular at the time. In the Nobel committee's presentation speech, both Main Street and Arrowsmith were cited.[9] The prize was awarded "... for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters."[10]
↑ Hackett, Alice Payne and Burke, James Henry (1977). 80 Years of Bestsellers: 1895 - 1975. New York: R.R. Bowker Company. p.91. ISBN0-8352-0908-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of, 1982, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (This author disliked the book herself and cited a review by Cathrin Beach Ely that agreed with her.)
↑ Dregni, Eric (2006). Weird Minnesota: Your Travel Guide to Minnesota's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. p.61. ISBN9781402739088.
↑ Gilbert, Rosalind (2000). Our Century: Revisiting Sauk Centre. p.77.
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House. Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).
Dodsworth is a satirical novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis, first published by Harcourt Brace & Company on March 14, 1929. Its subject, the differences between US and European intellect, manners, and morals, is one that frequently appears in the works of Henry James.
Elmer Gantry is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 that presents aspects of the religious activity of the United States in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it. Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, the protagonist, is attracted by drinking, making easy money and chasing women. After various forays into smaller, fringe churches, he becomes a major moral and political force in the Methodist Church despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions.
Sauk Centre is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 4,555 at the 2020 census. Sauk Centre is part of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930. The novel has been filmed twice, once as a silent in 1924 and remade as a talkie in 1934.
Boosterism is the act of promoting ("boosting") a town, city, or organization, with the goal of improving public perception of it. Boosting can be as simple as talking up the entity at a party or as elaborate as establishing a visitors' bureau.
Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author.
Winnemac is a fictional U.S. state invented by the writer Sinclair Lewis. His novel Babbitt takes place in Zenith, its largest city. Winnemac is also a setting for Gideon Planish, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth.
This is a list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1920s, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The list features the most popular novels of each year from 1920 through 1929.
The Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home is a historic house museum and National Historic Landmark in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, United States. From 1889 until 1902 it was the home of young Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), who would become the most famous American novelist of the 1920s and the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most famous book, Main Street, was inspired by the town of Sauk Centre as Lewis perceived it from this home.
The Beauty Prize is a musical comedy in three acts, with music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by George Grossmith and P. G. Wodehouse. It was first produced by Grossmith and J A E Malone on 5 September 1923 at the Winter Garden Theatre, Drury Lane, London. It was designed to replace The Cabaret Girl, which the same team had produced with great success the previous year, at the same theatre and with predominantly the same cast, but failed to achieve the same success. The review of the first night performance in The Times described it as:
not ... equal to its select band of predecessors... It has quite an involved plot, which is never very interesting: a vast number of characters, most of whom are never very convincing ... The 'book', by Mr George Grossmith and Mr P G Wodehouse, has many flashes of wit but, on the whole, the narrative is an arid desert in which the music of Mr Jerome Kern makes only an occasional oasis... At the end the piece obtained rather a mixed reception.
Lorna Doone Beers was an American novelist, poet, memoirist, and author of children's books. The winner of an early Hopwood Award for fiction, Ms. Beers was viewed by editors at E.P. Dutton in New York as a writer with the literary potential and the mastery of Midwestern themes and voices to become another Ole Rolvaag or even Sinclair Lewis. Her novels are praised for their strong characterizations of modern women, their sensitivity to the forces active in a changing America, and their clear-eyed poet’s view of life in the northern prairies. Her three major novels were written in the ten-year period between 1922 and 1932.
Main Street is a 1923 American silent drama film based on the 1920 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis. It was produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and directed by Harry Beaumont. A Broadway play version of the novel was produced in 1921. It was the first film to be released after the foundation of Warner Bros. Pictures on April 4, 1923.
The Man Who Knew Coolidge is a 1928 satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis. It features the return of several characters from Lewis' previous works, including George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Additionally, it sees a return to the familiar territory of Lewis' fictional American city of Zenith, in the state of Winnemac. Presented as six long, uninterrupted monologues by Lowell Schmaltz, a travelling salesman in office supplies, the eponymous first section was originally published in The American Mercury in 1927.
I Married a Doctor is a 1936 American drama film directed by Archie Mayo and written by Casey Robinson. It is an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street. The film stars Pat O'Brien, Josephine Hutchinson, Ross Alexander, Guy Kibbee, Louise Fazenda and Olin Howland. The film was released by Warner Bros. on April 25, 1936.
The Original Main Street Historic District stretches for ten blocks along Main Street in downtown Sauk Centre, Minnesota, United States. It is considered the inspiration for the 1920 novel Main Street by locally born author Sinclair Lewis, which in turn inspired the concept of "Main Street" as a symbol of American small towns. It was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 for its national significance in the theme of social history. It was nominated for its close identification with the bestselling novel of the 1920s and the enduring concept it popularized.
The 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American author Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." Buck was the first female American to be awarded the Nobel Prize and the third American recipient following Eugene O'Neill in 1936 and Sinclair Lewis in 1930. She was also the fourth woman to receive the prize.
The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the African-American novelist Toni Morrison (1931–2019) "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Morrison was awarded before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published. She became the first black woman of any nationality and the second American woman to win the prize since Pearl S. Buck in 1938. She is also the 8th woman to receive the prize.
The 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." He is the first American Nobel laureate in literature.
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