A Study Guide for Sinclair Lewis's Main Street

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535827980

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Main Street

Sinclair Lewis

1920

Introduction

Main Street, originally published in 1920, is the story of a sophisticated young woman who moves to a small town in the American Midwest in 1912 and struggles against the small-minded culture of the citizens who live there. The town, Gopher Prairie, is closely patterned on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which is where Sinclair Lewis grew up, although the book makes clear that it could be any of thousands of towns across the heartland. Carol Kennicott (née Milford), the protagonist of this novel, is a fascinating study in complexity: she loves her husband enough to live in Gopher Prairie with him, yet nearly enters several affairs in her longing for freedom; she hates the town for its gossip and its simplicity but wants nothing more than to make it better. The book touches on eternal American issues, such as women's rights, business among friends, and the spirit of anti-intellectualism that has always been at the center of small-town America, where sensitivity is often equated with self-absorption.

Main Street was an immediate, phenomenal success when it was published in 1920, making it the book of the century up to that point. It was the first in a string of novels written by Sinclair Lewis in the 1920s, including Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry, that established him as one of the preeminent authors of American literature. In these works, Lewis presents a response to a form of simplistic enthusiasm that tends to run through American culture, examining institutional religion, art, business, patriotism, and medicine with a skeptical eye. In 1930, he became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Author Biography

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town on the Central Plains that provided the inspiration for Main Street's Gopher Prairie. His father was a physician and, like Will Kennicott in the novel, was excessively concerned with appearances and proud of the rugged simplicity of his neighbors. Growing up, Lewis knew that he was considered odd by his fellow townspeople and that their narrow judgments did not prevail throughout the world at large. He attended Sauk Centre High School and in 1903 went to Yale, where he developed his writing, eventually becoming editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and publishing in the local New Haven newspaper. During extended breaks from college, he traveled the country, at one time working as a janitor in the New Jersey commune that was started by novelist Upton Sinclair.

Lewis graduated Yale with a bachelor's degree in 1908. He married Grace Livingston Hegger in 1914, and they had one son. The couple traveled while he worked various temporary jobs in the publishing industry and wrote a string of novels that were meant to be commercially successful, though not necessarily artistic.

Lewis's career changed in 1920, with the publication of Main Street. Not only was it his first book