The first of Sinclair Lewis's great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed,conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors,and--worst of all--the pettiness and bigotry of small-town minds.

Lewis"s portrayal of a marriage torn by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small-town America make Main Street a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in-twentieth-century American literature.

During the 1920s, at the height of his fame and literary power, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was more than a bestsdling author. He was a troublemaker, a disturber of the peace whose novels were hotly discussed as social criticism more than literature.Fiercely satiric works like Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Elmer Gantry (1927) were an important part of this raucous decade s self-examination. Americans recognized themselves in his books, which were at once iconoclastic and hugely entertaining, but they outraged some readers for their mocking portraits of ordinary citizens as comic types. The scandal culminated in 1930 when Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. His famous acceptance speech, later published as "The American Fear of Literature," was an attack on gentility and self-congratulation and a rallying cry for a younger generation of American writers who were restless, disillusioned, and hungry for recognition...

Introduction by Morris Dickstein

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

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Chapter 39