Main Street is the novel that was supposed to win Sinclair Lewis the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Widely popular in its day, the selection committee (the “novel jury”) recommended the novel to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, however it was overturned due to a controversial change to Mr. Pulitzer’s estate gift to Columbia University – changing the awards from those novels that represent the “whole” character of American life to those that represent the “wholesome” character of American life. The Board of Trustees of Columbia University overturned the jury’s decision, and instead Edith Wharton was awarded the prize, leaving Sinclair Lewis furious (a man already known for his tempestuous personality). He was overlooked again for his 1922 satire of American middle class materialism, Babbit. Lewis eventually won the Pulitzer (perhaps as an apology from Columbia University) for his lengthy satire of American medicine, Arrowsmith. Lewis loudly declined to accept his Pulitzer Prize.
This issue of the “wholesome” character of American culture is at the heart of themes raised in Main Street. In the novel, we discover simple-minded middle class people living in dreary small towns, like “Gopher Prairie,” sprawled throughout the Mid-West. Their lives are portrayed as silly and even ignorant, while Carol, a young city-girl who has been cultured by her University education, feels out of place as a new housewife. She soon discovers the prairie-fire gossip of the town in the many judging glances at her regular social faux pas. All the extant characters of the town are wooden and hollow, they are straw-men created by Lewis to be toyed around with, while Carol is unique and creative and imaginative and full of depth. Her politics and feminism, and interest in culture and art, fly in the face of everything the people of Gopher Prairie stand for. Her internal conflict is caught between needing to “reform” the town, or else simply allow the town to pitifully exist.
While Sinclair Lewis eventually left Sauk Centre for Yale (and he never returned), in Main Street Carol leaves Gopher Prairie for a short time only to return in defeat. Any lingering romantic notions about small town life in America is tragically burst in Main Street.
Sinclair Lewis comes to light as a kind of belligerent satirist of all things held dear in American culture; a slayer of sacred cows. His lifelong alcoholism can be seen splashed haphazardly across the pages of his novels. He hurriedly pokes fun at American virtues (as well as vices), though his satires rarely raise audiences to the point of laughter. They are, instead, austere and grave, yet fast-paced and one-dimensional. His novels are presented as long, meandering, and incomplete, though they are certainly compelling in their varying vignettes (such as in the case of Carol’s first party she throws in Gopher Prairie). One has to wonder if Lewis would continue his lambasting of small town American life had he survived into the present day wherein many “main streets” have struggled almost to the point of non-existence. Would he, instead, look back fondly on a former age in which people once came together out of a shared goal of mutual prosperity to build little towns and main streets across the nation?
Here are a few memorable passages from Main Street:
“On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.” (-opening lines which introduce Carol Milford as a student in St. Paul, Minnesota).
“This is America – a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
The town is, in our tale, called ‘Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.’ But its Main Street is the continuance of Main Streets everywhere.” (a segment from the author’s dedication at the outset).
“‘That’s what I’ll do after college! I’ll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I’d better become a teacher then, -but I won’t be that kind of a teacher!” (pg. 6; Carol in school fantasizing her future while in college).
“Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor” (pg. 22).
“When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes, she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired” (pg. 38).
“She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), ‘Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying?’ She quieted the doubt – without answering it'” (pg. 122).
“Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness” (pg. 160).
“In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, she talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them” (pg. 264).
“She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska; a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia” (pg. 520).
“But I have won in this: I’ve never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith” (pg. 521).
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York, Bantam Classics, 1996.