Main Street

Sinclair Lewis's barbed portrait of Gopher Prairie Minnesota shattered the myth of the American Middle West as God's Country and became a symbol of the cultural narrowmindedness and smug complacency of small towns everywhere. Carol Kennicott the wife of a town doctor dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community. This book takes the reader on her journey through the small town mindset and her struggles against it. The range of reactions when Main Street was published in 1920 was extraordinary reflecting the ambivalence in the novel itself and Lewis's own mixed feelings about his hometown of Sauk Centre Minnesota the prototype for Gopher Prairie.