- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (28 Feb 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140181245
- ISBN-13: 978-0140181241
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,815,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Carol Milford attended Blodgett College, Minneapolis, and in between tennis, dinner parties and the pursuit of culture, plans her next step in life. It will be something glamorous, but small town life in main street, was certainly not on her list, nor was small town marriage to Dr Kennicott.
About the Author
Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University in 1908. His college career was interrupted by various part-time occupations, including a period working at the Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's socialist experiment in New Jersey. He worked for some years as a freelance editor and journalist, during which time he published several minor novels. But with the publication of Main Street (1920), which sold half a million copies, he achieved wide recognition. This was followed by the two novels considered by many to be his finest, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis. In 1930, following Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature. This was the apogee of his literary career, and in the period from Ann Vickers (1933) to the posthumously published World So Wide (1951) Lewis wrote ten novels that reveal the progressive decline of his creative powers. During his last years Sinclair Lewis wandered extensively in Europe, and after his death in Rome in 1951 his ashes were returned to his birthplace.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Carol Milford, an enlightened, beautiful, young woman gets married. She thinks she is marrying Dr. Kennicott, she doesn't know that she is also marrying his town, Gopher Prairie. She tries to love the town and tries hard. She wants to improve things, change, reform. She is faced with stone walls. And ugly ones at that. They resent her, they don't take her seriously, they call her crazy, flippant, foolish, snobbish, arrogant, silly, light woman, bad woman and a lot of other things. She alternates between wanting to give up and to continue. At times she is lazy, diligent, hopeless, hopeful, resigned, rebellious and often lonely. I read Carol's story as if I was living it. Half way through the book, I was giving her advice: "Run for your life!" or "Hang in there!". Sinclair Lewis is a brilliant narrator. He tells the story of Gopher Prairie with wit, charm and sarcastic humour. I believe that he was the first male feminist of America. The next book I'll be reading is Babbitt.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street was something of a literary phenomenon when it was first published in 1920, the book rather daringly satirising good wholesome smalltown values that were very much in vogue at the time. While it is therefore very much of its time in its theme, and certainly old-fashioned in its writing style, the manner in which Main Street depicts American traditional social values and attitudes in tremendous detail, showing where they derive from and how they persist, means that the novel still has a great deal of relevance.
Lewis more or less states his purpose in a brief introduction where he sets out that he is going to examine the proposition that the Main Street of small mid-western towns represent "the climax of civilisation". That's certainly not the view of liberal and cultured Carol Milford of Minneapolis, who is proud of her heritage and sees America as "a glorious country; a land to be big in", but fears that the blissful stagnation and "dullness made God" in the peasant population of smalltown America rather lets the side down. And really, do the Main Streets of such towns have to be quite so ugly?
Her dream of planting "a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity" is put to the test when she marries Dr. Kennicott, 13 years her elder, and moves to Gopher Prairie, believing she can made a model town out of it, seeing it as an empire to conquer. Gopher Prairie however is a hopeless backwater, whose peasant population is made up principally of German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants, with a social hierarchy of professionals and traders that is unwarrantedly proud and self-satisfied of their mediocre little town and their modest achievements. Feeling somewhat out of place, Carol has difficulty adjusting - or rather lowering - herself to what passes for culture and society among the women folk, organising dinner parties and starting up a dramatic society, but she is continually disillusioned with the lowbrow entertainment, the dreary conversations, gossip and obsession with mundane trivialities.
Inevitably, since there is a necessity to fit-in and adjust, Carol comes to appreciate the qualities she sees around her in the simplicity of the good, honest, hardworking folk, as well as their fortitude in dealing with deprivations and hardship. Dealt with in such length however, the novel has a tendency to also dwell on the minutiae of dreary domesticity, and there is the danger that the novel will also succumb to the Village Virus, but Carol is determined to resist, and the novel does well to do likewise, being psychologically accurate and fascinating in how it observes and identifies the underlying characteristics in the division of the classes and the sexes.
Swaying between eulogising and satirising the qualities of the small town and the people within it, the novel captures the true dynamic in America society at a crucial period in its development. More than being a historical record then, one that is recounted in fabulous and no doubt realistic detail, it's clear that the same social attitudes and values persist to a large degree in modern-day America and the world, becoming a "force seeking to dominate the earth" and bully other civilisations into its standardised, mediocre view of the world. Main Street consequently still has a great deal of interest and relevance today.
Lewis more or less states his purpose in a brief introduction where he sets out that he is going to examine the proposition that the Main Street of small mid-western towns represent "the climax of civilisation". That's certainly not the view of liberal and cultured Carol Milford of Minneapolis, who is proud of her heritage and sees America as "a glorious country; a land to be big in", but fears that the blissful stagnation and "dullness made God" in the peasant population of smalltown America rather lets the side down. And really, do the Main Streets of such towns have to be quite so ugly?
Her dream of planting "a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity" is put to the test when she marries Dr. Kennicott, 13 years her elder, and moves to Gopher Prairie, believing she can made a model town out of it, seeing it as an empire to conquer. Gopher Prairie however is a hopeless backwater, whose peasant population is made up principally of German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants, with a social hierarchy of professionals and traders that is unwarrantedly proud and self-satisfied of their mediocre little town and their modest achievements. Feeling somewhat out of place, Carol has difficulty adjusting - or rather lowering - herself to what passes for culture and society among the women folk, organising dinner parties and starting up a dramatic society, but she is continually disillusioned with the lowbrow entertainment, the dreary conversations, gossip and obsession with mundane trivialities.
Inevitably, since there is a necessity to fit-in and adjust, Carol comes to appreciate the qualities she sees around her in the simplicity of the good, honest, hardworking folk, as well as their fortitude in dealing with deprivations and hardship. Dealt with in such length however, the novel has a tendency to also dwell on the minutiae of dreary domesticity, and there is the danger that the novel will also succumb to the Village Virus, but Carol is determined to resist, and the novel does well to do likewise, being psychologically accurate and fascinating in how it observes and identifies the underlying characteristics in the division of the classes and the sexes.
Swaying between eulogising and satirising the qualities of the small town and the people within it, the novel captures the true dynamic in America society at a crucial period in its development. More than being a historical record then, one that is recounted in fabulous and no doubt realistic detail, it's clear that the same social attitudes and values persist to a large degree in modern-day America and the world, becoming a "force seeking to dominate the earth" and bully other civilisations into its standardised, mediocre view of the world. Main Street consequently still has a great deal of interest and relevance today.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street" deals honestly with the negative aspects of small town life. In the book, Carol Kennicott, a big city girl marries Dr. Kennicott, and they move to the small town of Gopher Prarie. Carol is an idealist, but her efforts to reform the town are met with ignorance. The citizens of Gopher Prarie are convinced that they lead a utopian life, and that poverty and ugliness does not exist in their town. Carol is subjected to gossip, greed, and dullness in her journey through Gopher Prarie. I think this book is an accurate description of many small towns, but it deals too negatively with small towns. I have visited many times Lewis's hometown of Sauk Centre, after which Gopher Prarie was modeled, and found none of the drab buildings and narrow minded people that Lewis described. Howver, this novel is a classic example of how our own ignorance prevents us from seeing our true surrondings. This book is a real eye opener.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Reminded me of Middlemarch - and of The Women's Room
I bought this novel after reading Sinclair Lewis's gripping story of a fascist takeover of the US, `It Can't Happen Here'. Read more
Published on 31 Aug 2009 by Sarah A. Brown
A seed of liberty
For Sinclair Lewis, his country is `a hope that is boundless. What is its future? A future of cities and factory smut? Homes universal and secure? Read more
Published on 4 Aug 2009 by Luc REYNAERT
Excruciatingly dull novel that has notabel literary merit
MAIN STREET is considered Lewis's Song of Songs, or his masterpiece. Being a writer, if this was my ultimate achievement, I would be thoroughly depressed and forsake writing and... Read more
Published on 17 Oct 2007 by Mike London
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