Main Street

Carol Milford is a clever, restless young librarian full of dreams of beauty and civic improvement when she marries Will Kennicott, a steady country doctor, and goes to live in his home town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She arrives certain she will transform the place — give it parks and theatre and conversation, drag it out of its provincial dullness and make it lovely. Gopher Prairie has other ideas.

The town meets Carol's reforming energy first with indifference and then with quiet hostility, until she is marked as a conceited outsider who thinks herself too good for honest folk. What follows is the long, funny, painful record of her revolt against the smugness and sameness of small-town life — a rebellion that turns by turns into loneliness, snobbery, flight, and an uneasy, unconquered return. Lewis is too honest to let either Carol or the town simply win, and readers have argued ever since over whether his heroine is a martyr of the spirit or a naïve dreamer in love with her own discontent.

Published in 1920, Main Street became one of the great sensations in American publishing and the book against which the small town would be measured for a century. Its satirical realism — built on an unequalled ear for the way ordinary Americans actually talked — set the pattern for Babbitt and the run of novels that, in 1930, made Sinclair Lewis the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Pulitzer jury chose it in 1921, only to have the trustees overrule them and give the prize to Edith Wharton; the book the committee found too unwholesome to honour has outlasted the verdict.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor's foreword on the novel's composition, its Pulitzer controversy, and its meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.