Main Street

On page 25 I thought – this guy is brilliant.On page 50 I thought – this guy is exhaustively brilliant.On page 100 I thought – I’m exhausted.On page 150 I thought – I’ll never get out of this novel alive.On page 200 I thought – so who knew there could be so much DETAIL about every last possible aspect of one teensy Minnesotan town lodged inside the Tardis-like head of Sinclair Lewis?On page 213 my eye fell upon this :It’s the worst defeat of all. I’m beaten. By Main Street. I m [...]

"A bomb to blow up smugness" is what one woman hopefully calls her child in Sinclair Lewis's broadside attack on mainstream America, and that's surely what this book is.I didn't know a book can be quiet and bombastic at the same time, but Lewis has written it. It covers just over a decade in Carol Milford's life, as her dreams are repeatedly drowned. She comes to Main Street, America, with grand plans to mean something in a dimly socialist way. Main Street is having none of it.Lewis has a messag [...]

This was Lewis first novel, published in 1920, and it was a huge success, both critically and commercially. It made him a rich man and launched a career that would include the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930. Lewis felt that Main Street should have won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 but was edged out by Edith Wharton's, The Age of Innocence. It so incensed Lewis that when he did win it in 1925 for Arrowsmith, he refused to accept the award.Main Street was the first major novel that featured small [...]

I was dimly aware of Sinclair Lewis but completely unfamiliar with his work when I read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America a couple of years ago. Steinbeck, who admired Lewis, wanted to find his way from St Paul to Sauk Centre, Lewis' Minnesota hometown and the town on which the fictional location of this novel, Gopher Prairie, is based. He recounts his conversation with a waitress in a diner who gave him directions to the town: "They got a sign up. I guess quite a few f [...]

I definitely liked this book and recommend it to others. There is so much to think about; it can be discussed from many different angles. So what are its topics? First of all, life in small towns versus life in cities. This is what the book is said to be about. Love is another theme. It is not a soppy love story though! Maturing, becoming an adult, figuring out how to live in a real world, not a world of only idealistic dreams. It is about growing up, not the teen years, but the years after that [...]

Small-town America. Ah, the scent of pine. The musty ramshackle old hardware store. But what is this? Something amiss in one of these romanticized burgs? Something dark and sinister? "I never imagined something like this would happen in our town," says the half-toothless talking head on the six o'clock news about the murder, even though you've seen this very thing happen in small towns 10,000 times in your life on the six o'clock news. Small-town America is supposed to be different somehow; supp [...]

I can't properly rate this book, because I did not enjoy it (or finish it yet), but I appreciate the satire and how its "commentary" on small minded people still holds true today. To me, Lewis didn't try to build deep, interesting characters, he built representations about everything that reeks in society. This is a book that says, "You think you can change the way people think? Well, follow me to Main Street, and we will see about that." He treated the protagonists and antagonists with the same [...]

I had just moved to a small town in Minnesota - with the same aspirations as this classic charater of many years before me, yet my thoughts and run ins were very much the same 50 years later. It was a reminder that one fits or one doesn't fit but to spend your life trying to change the engrained to your likely only means you will spend your life in turmoil, in hopes others after you, long after you will find the place more to your liking. Shortly afterwards - I moved.

This book went on too long for me -- I ended up losing interest in and patience with Carol. I felt like I should sympathize with her but didn't in fact do so.Lloyd James was very good with the narration which did help me persevere through.

প্রথমত নামটা ভালো হইছে বইটার। একটা মফস্বল ধাঁচের শহরের ক্লান্তির প্রথম নিদর্শন ত তার ঐ রাস্তাটাই - বাংলায় রাস্তাটারে কী বলে? বাজার রোড?দ্বিতীয়ত, বইটা ভালো লাগে নাই। লুইসের রসবোধ যে প্রখর সেট [...]

Kept feeling like a disappoving old lady reading this book: "This young man writes very well, but I don't like his tone." Smug. Unutterably smug, and he doesn't seem to like or care about any of his characters, which makes the whole exercise rather cold. I suppose, ninety years later, the "small towns are narrow-minded and hypocritical" theme has been done to death, and Lewis deserves credit for pioneering the genre, but on the whole I didn't like it.

actually kinda won me over at the end, once the main character actually, y'know, DID SOMETHING. but the first 200 or so pages of "small-town satire," which is just a buncha dad-bern idjits talkin' like this is some of the most annoying shit i've ever read in my life. beyond comprehension that this guy won a nobel prize. though i guess english wasn't the jury's first language.

The main character is me. Wow, she is blowing me away by her similarities, and I am both impressed with the ability to capture me in text, and embarrassed that the one literary character that represents me the most is so flawed.I want to be Anne Elliot (or Elizabeth or Emma for that matter), or Menolly, or Hermione or Katniss (Erm, maybe not), heroines that are strong and without major flaws. Instead I am Carol Kennicott the most maddening main character I have ever met and she is me to a tee!Ca [...]

Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. The citation reads for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters. His most well-known novels are Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922). Main Street ruffled more than a few feathers in small town America when it was first published in 1920, and I expect it has the same effect on some readers today, nearly a century later. Sinclair Lew [...]

Caustic satire of small-town life. Although some of the concepts in the book are invariably dated, the concept and the characters are still only too familiar, and the follies of small-town living are laid bare.

This book was intensely personal to me – so much so that I found myself closing the book so I could just stare at the wall and think at points. The plot concerns the struggles of a woman, Carol, against the strange omniscience and rigidity of a small Midwestern town. She is a city-girl who marries a country doctor and optimistically sets out for a new life on the prairie, circa World War I. Upon settling in, she realizes that her ideas for “improving” the town through the introduction of h [...]

Originally published on my blog here in November 2000.Main Street has been described as "one of the most merciless novels ever written". It is an apt description of this depiction of small town midwestern America in the early years of this century, but there is an important element in Lewis' writing which it does not convey.Lewis understands his subject through and through, and that makes what he has to say not just merciless but believable. He also doesn't just restrict his attack to provincial [...]

As someone with a deep familiarity with small town rural life in the upper plains, this book should certainly have been appealing to me. The points that Lewis returns to over and over again--that these towns are full of narrow-minded, self-important fools--are undeniably true. Maybe it's because I grew up in such a town though, instead of being a transplant like the book's protagonist Carol, that I also feel a certain grudging respect and even love for these places. Lewis' knives are also out fo [...]

I was really interested in the themes of this book. The novel is strikingly relevant even 90-something years after its publication. The protagonist, Carrie, struggles against falling into the rut of quiet, midwestern life while progressivism rages on in the bustling cities she once called home. I could sympathise with a lot of her feelings- the stagnancy and the dullness of the country compared to urban life. They didn't really have suburbs as we know them back in the 1910s, but I could relate t [...]

I used to travel occasionally across the state and visited some small towns where I thought, “This looks pretty nice… maybe not much going on…but, if you had not been previously spoiled by the trappings of “city” life (i.e. did not know better) it might be an enjoyable place to live.” Well…this book annihilated that little theory. I suppose I had it partially right in that you can’t move down to the farm after you’ve seen gay Paris (that’s a joke if you know where I live). Bu [...]

Read this in high school, well it was a summer reading book and I remember hating it. I actually enjoyed a lot of my summer reading list including Watership Down, The Once and Future King, The Jungle, and others, but this one killed it for me. Looking back, however, I'm pretty sure I missed something when I first read it, some joke that everyone got but me. I think I may have to revisit this one day and see how my more literate and well-read (and snobbish) self rates it.

A satire isn't necessarily funny or lighthearted. Critical--yes. Pessimistic--yes. Main Street is just that book. The characters are ridiculed by the author and don't seem to improve their vices, or change their points of view from beginning to end. But sometimes who doesn't enjoy some sarcasm? I did.

Carol Kennicott is a fish out of water in small-town America. Her arc is discovering that, as the big-city suffragette tells her, she should challenge one conformist law at a time. Despite finding Sinclair Lewis to be a condescending snob, I believe him to be one extraordinary writer. The effete snobbery is the belief that small-town America is filled with petty, unimaginative, conformist boobs, who are in dire need of the sophistication of the metropolis and the old world. They are backbiting a [...]

I was plagued by Insomnia recently.Oh,this has nothing to do with thebook. what need to do isto write something down randomly To mitigate the guilty of wasting time.The book is a would-be hardcover for me,I mean, still on the way transported here when I bought it online last month and to my dismay,I haven't got the slight idea where it was stranded for now. Ironicly, I felt relieved of its delayed delivery cause I am not quite poised to challenge the great odds that reading the book would exhaus [...]

I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, it’s a nicely biting critique of a certain “small town” mindsets of closed-mindedness, stagnation, and self-righteousness. Lewis is vividly evocative in both setting and character, and he does a creditable job of presenting both sides of the question, through his heroine’s decided flaws. In the end, however, this is still, foremost, a critique of the small town, not the heroine who would reform it. As such, I can’t help but disagree with alm [...]

Sometimes I don't want to be a character's best friend, and actually enjoy disliking them intensely. Carol comes to a bucolic little town and wants to turn it into a cultured little haven for those wanting to escape city life. In other words, they want to leave the city, but bring it along with them. As a native of a small town where a bunch of transplants have attempted (and succeeded) to turn it into a twee little "getaway", I admit to having more than a tad of satisfaction at Carol's collapse [...]

I really enjoyed this book on a few different levels. The theme of a young bright girl marrying a country doctor and then being dissatisfied with her marriage is an obvious homage to 'Madame Bovary' but the story remains unique not only to the time and culture of its setting but to the characters themselves.The main character Carol is not really missing so much the glitz and glamour of a big city, but of intellectual discourse and discussions of the arts, etc. that she can find in a more urban e [...]

"Main Street" is the story of how a college-educated city girl copes with living in small-town America. It is set in Minnesota from the years 1910 to 1920. Lewis has written a satire on small time life which was being depicted at the time as the most wholesome environment in America if not the entire world. In Lewis' view, small towns were made up of nosy people who were constantly in each other's business with a strong religious component (offset by the level of gossip going on)and a reluctance [...]

This book left me with mixed feelings. I did not enjoy the main character very much and so it took time to read the book and I was never excited to pick it up again. However, the insights given in the book I enjoyed. When one moves to a new place where is the balance between accepting those around you and keeping your individuality. In this case it is about a college educated woman moving to a small rural community in the early 1900's. At the same time there are many issues that women deal with [...]

An educated, cultured, big city girl moves to a small town as a result of her marriage to the town doctor and finds herself struggling with the overwhelming simplicity of life and mentality she finds there. Her struggles are at the center of the book. This book was simply amazing: completely eye-opening for me. As an individual living in a rural area, I could identify perfectly well with the main character. When you are in a place where being cultured is looked down upon, you feel like you eithe [...]