Will I love Main Street?

With biting satire and elegiac prose, Main Street is the paragon of stories set in small towns.

Author Sinclair Lewis was obviously not enamored of small towns, and like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, is perhaps exorcising some demons from his own upbringing. Nevertheless, perhaps unable to help himself, he instills his protagonist, Carol Milford (Kennicott) with a “Never give up” small town value. At the end she is undaunted. Even though she’s been stifled at nearly every turn, in her own words she has “kept the faith.”

I love the work of Sinclair Lewis. I based the character of… show more.

The decade after World War One was the beginning of today's America. We had saved the world from future wars and were basking in a roaring economy. Yet, much like the 1950s (another post-war boom decade) something simmered.

Main Street was Lewis' second published novel, the first in which he used his pen to poke at the edges of his uncertainty of the value we gave to the things we had, and the things to which we aspired. Lewis does this, powerfully, with the story of an educated, big-city, left-of-center woman who moves to her husband's small, conservative town after… show more.