Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lewis’s portrayal of women is surprisingly sensitive. The racism, religious bigotry, puritanical righteousness, and duplicitous business practices Lewis exposed are with us still. Lewis’s intimate knowledge of small-town America and his gift for creating realistic characters make Main Street a compelling classic still surprisingly relevant today. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser who sought more realism in their work. Sinclair Lewis was in the vanguard of a generation of American writers like Ernest Hemingway. Carol sets out to improve the town, but is met with distrust and derision, and finds herself becoming a pariah. Young and optimistic, Carol is dismayed by the town’s drabness and finds the inhabitants conforming and petty. Based on Lewis’s own experiences growing on Sauk Centre, Minnesota and set in the mid-1910s, it follows Carol Kennicott, who leaves her librarian job and St. Lewis’s biting satire countered the American myth of wholesome small-town life with a depiction of narrow-minded provincialism with struck a chord – or hit a nerve – with Americans. The printers could not keep up with the orders, and for a while the publishers had to ration out copies to book-sellers.” Biographer Mark Schorer wrote: it “was the most sensational event in 20th-century American publishing history, from the point of view both of sales and of public response.

Published in 1920, Main Street was Sinclair Lewis’s first big hit. This 100th Anniversary Edition, with new new Foreword by biographer Richard Lingeman and a new Afterword to the Audiobook by Dr.

Main street by sinclair lewis