Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author), Brooke Allen (Introduction)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. “This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.” So Sinclair Lewis—recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer—prefaces his novel Main Street. Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self-satisfied inhabitants of small-town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty.

Brooke Allen holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She is a book critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, and The New Leader. A collection of her essays, Twentieth Century Attitudes, will be published in 2003.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Brooke Allen’s Introduction to Main Street

Main Street is very, very American, but it is not purely American. Shaw, in his characteristically flippant manner, spoke the truth when he said that Lewis’s criticisms applied to other nations as well, but that Americans clung to the idea that they were unique in their faults (Literary Digest, December 6, 1930); the British novelist John Galsworthy remarked, truly, that “Every country, of course, has its Main Streets” (Lewis, From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930). Still, a disdain for intellect (or for what we nowadays prefer to denigrate as elitism) has been particularly marked in America, perhaps because of our commitment, stated if not practiced, to egalitarian democracy: On Main Street, Lewis writes, “to be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.”

More than eighty years after Lewis’s novel this is true, and it is true not only on Main Street but on Wall Street as well, and on Park Avenue, and on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is what makes Main Street such a stunning achievement: While it succeeds in being “contemporary history,” capturing a particular place at a particular moment in time, it also speaks for our own time; it is remarkable how much of Main Street is still pertinent. Gopher Prairie at war is not so very unlike our own flag-waving “war on terrorism.” Will Kennicott’s breezy dismissal of legal procedure—“Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it’s justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure”—can be read on almost any editorial page today. Gopher Prairie’s commercial ethos of material “progress” at the expense of every other variety, an idea Lewis would expand and crystallize in Babbitt, has been refined rather than improved in our own era of no-collar workers who meditate or practice yoga before closing the Big Deal rather than smoking cigars and guzzling alcohol.

Lewis, unlike so many of his contemporaries, was never tempted to look for an answer in political dogma: He hated dictatorships and had no particular faith in the virtue or good judgment of “the people.” All he really believed in was the wavering, imperfect liberal spirit: “Even if Com[munism] & Fax[cism] or both cover the world, Liberal[ism] must go on, seeming futile, preserving civilization,” he wrote in his notes for It Can’t Happen Here (quoted in Lingeman).

An atheist with no political illusions, two failed marriages, an unconquerable addiction to alcohol, and a moribund talent might be thought to have had every reason to give up in despair. Lewis, to his undying credit, did not. “It is a completely revelatory American tragedy,” he said in his Nobel Prize speech, “that in our land of freedom, men like [Hamlin] Garland, who first blast the roads to freedom, become themselves the most bound.” This has been true of many; it was never true of Lewis. Like Carol Kennicott, he was still reaching—though generally failing to grasp—right up to the end. His particular type of sociological fiction had gone out of fashion at the time of his death, and he continued to be undervalued for decades afterward. But in recent years we have returned to an appreciation for what he accomplished artistically. For what he was able to tell us about American life, in his day and in ours, we can only be grateful.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics (August 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593080360
• ISBN-13: 978-1593080365
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #157,289 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and Well Told Story, June 4, 2004

By	MZ (Novinger, MO United States) - See all my reviews

Carol is a girl with big dreams. When she marries Kennicott, she moves from the Twin Cities where she has supported herself, to rural life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where it is her dream to transform the sleepy town into something better.

The ups and downs of Carrie Kennicott's life were felt by each member of our Family Book Club. Just when it seems things can't get any worse for Carrie, they can -- but sometimes they get better.

This book has been subject to a lot of literary criticism. Surely, the story can be studied in many ways at many levels. However, one does not need to have a master's in English in order to get a lot of enjoyment out of Main Street.

Set in the 1920s, Carrie's story -- her feelings, the changes she tries to make to Gopher Prairie, and all of the people she meets there -- could easily be told today with only minor changes. And, although this book is overall rather depressing in nature, there were quite a few places that it had me laughing out loud.

Main Street really captures the aura of small town America, especially middle Minnesota. The real life Gopher Prairie is Sauk Centre, Minnesota. It's an interesting place to visit, as the main street there has now been renamed Sinclair Lewis Boulevard.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The more things change..., December 29, 2008

By	Snowball's Chance (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews

This was the book that gave us the phrase "Main Street" to denote middle, everyday America. The phrase we heard ad nauseam during the bank bail outs - Main Street vs Wall Street. The book captures the divide between rural and urban people, a battle we still fight today. The current usage of the term, with Main Street representing good, is an irony Lewis would proud of.

Carol, the main character, marries into a small town after having been independent and living in a large city, a big deal in a just-now post-Victorian period. She tries to introduce her new neighbors to new experiences - exotic foods, new styles, new ways of thinking - and completely fails at it. She doesn't hold her tongue either; "ash pile", a favorite term of hers, is about the modern equivalent of "s***hole". I've a feeling many the teen has been put off by her "modern" tastes - Chinese food and showing ankle seem pedestrian through a lens of 100 years. Today, she's be serving organic Latin-Asian fusion cuisine with a plunging neckline and going on about Pilates, and trying to start up neighborhood activist groups. And calling the town a s***hole.

One of thing things Carol rails against is the lack of high achievers in the town. As Sinclair puts it, most people capable (or desiring) real competition don't stay in town. The people who fear change or can't cope in a competitive environment stay put, enjoying the simplicities of small town life, with like minded people. And wind up drive Carol crazy with frustration.

Carol's story makes me thankful I live today - as a woman I have a choice in where I'm to live, and that divorce is a alternative for such a miss-matched couple. Her life-long entrapment is a fate most women today don't have to face. Still, she's willing to face who she is and not back down.

My main criticism of Sinclair Lewis is that he doesn't seem to take much pleasure in life. Everything rings hollow and false, with opportunities for genuine amusement and enjoyment lost. On the other hand, that world view does make for some biting sarcasm and commentary. I still giggle to myself when I remember the line (I'm quoting from memory) about the annoying teenage boy who caught the flu during the 1918 epidemic "but didn't have the sense to die of it".

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A seed of liberty, August 4, 2009

By	Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

For Sinclair Lewis, his country is `a hope that is boundless. What is its future? A future of cities and factory smut? Homes universal and secure? Or placid châteaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? The ancient stale inequalities?'

The answer to these questions lies in the fate of the main character of this book, Carol Milford, a seed of liberty, `a rebellious girl eager to conquer the world - almost entirely for the world's own good.'
But her dreams are blocked by a wall of Puritanism, conservatism, conformism, hypocrisy and egoism, by the Tribal God of Mediocrity, by the arrogance of the power of `Main Street'.
Who occupies `Main Street'? The Churches, `the real heart of the community, the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities'; also the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party (`Everybody who doesn't love (it) is an anarchist').
Main Streeters are all those wanting to appear respectable, showing `poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge.'

Carol Milford `felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street'. She was `surrounded by wolves, fangs and sneering eyes.' `They beat me with rods of dullness.'
Is her fight for `liberty' successful or will she be beaten ... keeping only the faith?

Read this exemplary US novel about the power of the Moral Majority and its `public opinions'.