Main Street (Annotated)

Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) is a landmark of American realism and social satire, anatomizing the complacencies of small-town life through the restless idealism of Carol Milford Kennicott. Set in the fictional Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, the novel exposes provincial conformity, aesthetic barrenness, gender constraint, and the tyranny of "normal" opinion. Lewis's prose is lucid, ironic, and s...