Carol Milford is an ambitious, idealistic young woman who, after college in Chicago and a stint as a librarian in Minneapolis, marries Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and moves with him to his hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Armed with big-city ideas about art, culture, and reform, Carol sets out to remake the town in her own image, only to collide again and again with the quaint complacency-and quiet resistance-of its townsfolk, all while her marriage grows steadily colder.
Published in 1920 and modeled on Sauk Centre, the Minnesota town where Lewis himself grew up, Main Street is a richly detailed, bitingly satirical portrait of small-town American provincialism that became an immediate sensation and is still counted among the candidates for the Great American Novel. A jury recommended it for the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, only for the prize's trustees to overturn the decision and award it instead to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence-a snub Lewis never forgot. When he was awarded the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith in 1926, he pointedly declined it, and reporters at the time attributed his refusal to lingering anger over Main Street's treatment. The novel was nonetheless cited among his achievements when Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930.
Spend a season on Main Street and decide for yourself whether Gopher Prairie is a prison or a home-and whether Carol Kennicott's crusade to civilize it is heroic, foolish, or both.
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