Synopsis
Carol Kennicott marries a small-town doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, hoping that her idealistic belief in social reform can be realized. Instead, she observes firsthand the stifling realities of small town life--cultural narrowness, smugness, petty cruelties--and finds that her marriage can't survive what she learns. Sinclair Lewis's best-selling 1920 novel was controversial in its time because of its gritty refusal to romanticize small-town life--one of America's fondest myths.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-04-01 | | Series: | Bantam Classic | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Height: | 7.0 in | | Width: | 4.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early 20th century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed and petty small-minded bigotry. First time in Bantam Classic print.
This classic by Sinclair Lewis shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire. Main Street attacks the conformity and dullness of early 20th Century midwestern village life in the story of Carol Milford, the city girl who marries the town doctor. Her efforts to bring culture to the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, and petty small-minded bigotry. Lewis's complex and compelling work established him as an important character in American literature.
Industry Reviews
"'Main Street' is being vaselined by the newspaper[s]...and pawed by the women's clubs, not because it happens to be a very competent piece of writing, but simply and solely because it presents an extremely acidulous picture of human existence in a small American town, and thus caresses the vanity of all those who are able to thank God that they do not live in such a town, and are not as Dr. Lewis' folk are....Here, of course, I do not sniff at Herr von Lewis' achievement. On the contrary, I seize the opportunity to say again, as I said a good while back, that 'Main Street' is a very excellent piece of work, boldly imagined and often brilliantly executed....Books as good as 'Main Street' should be admired on a plane above mere prejudices...the cockney should not be so ready to laugh at the poor yokel: he is quite as thumping an ass himself."
Baltimore Sun - H. L. Mencken (01/03/1921)
"It is not just MAIN STREET'S heroine, who longs to get out of Gopher Prairie; it is the reader as well. And yet this novel, with all its vacillations and ambiguities of artistic purpose, has a reach of greatness to it, a sense of human softness and helpless witness. The popular success of the book derived, my suspicion is..., from the identification of many female readers with the heroine."
New Yorker - John Updike
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