Main Street

The Book That Made Lewis

Sinclair Lewis published Main Street in October 1920, and it sold two hundred thousand copies in its first year. Lewis was thirty-five years old, had published five previous novels to negligible attention, and was suddenly the most famous novelist in America. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize — and then the Pulitzer board reversed its own committee’s decision, refusing to award it on the grounds that it was not “wholesome.” Lewis would go on to decline the Pulitzer he was actually awarded for Arrowsmith five years later. The relationship between Lewis and official American culture was always antagonistic.

Main Street is the first sustained portrait of American small-town life from a perspective of critical intelligence rather than nostalgia. Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota — the model for Gopher Prairie — and he knew the place from inside: the pleasures of community, the comfort of familiar faces, and the systematic pressure to conform that was exerted on anyone who read too many books, held unconventional opinions, or failed to be boosterish about local real estate values. He had been that person, and he had left, and he spent the rest of his career writing about what he had escaped.

Carol Milford and Her Enemies

Carol Kennicott (née Milford) is Lewis’s most complex protagonist — more interesting, in some ways, than the male heroes of Babbitt and Arrowsmith because she is both more sympathetic and more critically examined. She arrives in Gopher Prairie full of idealism: she will bring theatre, culture, architecture, discussion groups, anything that might lift the town above its flat satisfaction with itself. The town declines to be lifted.

What Lewis renders with uncomfortable precision is not simply the town’s hostility but Carol’s own failures. She is idealistic in a vague, aesthetic way — she wants culture without knowing exactly what she wants it for, or who she wants it with. Her projects founder not only because Gopher Prairie resists them but because Carol has not thought carefully enough about what she is doing and why. Lewis does not allow his protagonist to be simply the victim of her environment; he insists that she is partly the victim of her own inadequately examined idealism.

The Sociology of Conformity

The novel’s great achievement is its sociological detail — the enumeration of Gopher Prairie’s Main Street, its houses, its citizens, its conversations, its recreational life — which is both satirical and, within its satire, accurate. Lewis understands how conformity operates: not through overt coercion but through a thousand small social pressures, the raised eyebrow at an unconventional opinion, the cold shoulder after a failed party, the way that anyone who reads too much or thinks too much is quietly excluded from the social warmth that makes a small community survivable.

Carol eventually leaves Gopher Prairie — spends two years in Washington — and returns. Not because she has been defeated, exactly, but because the novel is honest about what leaving achieves: a temporary escape, not a solution. The conformity is national, not local. Main Street runs through every American town, and Carol, returning, has at least the clarity of knowing it.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — The novel that invented the satirical portrait of American small-town life and remains its most thorough and honest example.

The Pulitzer Controversy

Main Street was recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the prize committee in 1921, and the Pulitzer board overruled its own committee’s decision — citing the novel’s failure to be “wholesome” in its portrayal of American life. The incident was characteristic both of the novel’s cultural impact (only a book that had genuinely disturbed the official self-image of American culture could provoke such a response) and of Lewis’s relationship with institutional American culture (he would go on to decline the Pulitzer he was actually awarded for Arrowsmith in 1926, on the grounds that such prizes fostered unhealthy conformity in American writing).

Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota — population about three thousand, the direct model for Gopher Prairie — and left it as soon as he could. The novel is not simply a hostile outsider’s portrait of a place he never understood; it is the portrait of a place he understood from the inside and could not forgive for what it had made him and what it continued to make of the people who stayed. This intimacy gives the satire its accuracy and its cruelty: Lewis knew exactly which details to select.

Carol and the Limits of Reform

Carol Kennicott’s failure to transform Gopher Prairie is presented by Lewis with an honesty that is sometimes mistaken for hostility toward Carol herself. He is harder on her idealism than a simpler satirist would be, but the hardness is not contempt: it is the recognition that idealism without a theory of change is not sufficient, and that Carol’s version of culture — aestheticized, vaguely theatrical, imported from outside rather than grown from within — was never going to succeed in Gopher Prairie regardless of the town’s resistance.

This does not mean the town is right. Lewis is equally precise about the systematic social pressure that Gopher Prairie exerts on anyone who reads too much, holds unconventional opinions, or fails to be enthusiastic about local real estate values. The raised eyebrow at an unusual opinion, the cold shoulder after an unsuccessful party, the network of small social exclusions that makes nonconformity uncomfortable: these are rendered with the specificity of direct experience, and they constitute, cumulatively, a portrait of conformity as a totalizing social force.

The National Subject

Main Street was the best-selling novel in America in both 1920 and 1921, which means that Lewis’s portrait of small-town conformity found its largest audience precisely among the people it was describing. This is either a paradox or a confirmation: Americans recognized what Lewis was showing them, and bought the book in their millions, and then continued to live more or less as they had before. Lewis understood this. Carol returns to Gopher Prairie at the end of the novel, not because she has been defeated but because the conformity is national rather than local, and there is nowhere to go where Main Street does not run.

The novel’s lasting influence on American literature — as the first major satire of small-town life, the template for dozens of subsequent portraits of provincial America — is inseparable from its influence on how Americans think about the tension between individual aspiration and communal pressure. Lewis named something that needed a name, and the naming has not stopped being useful.