Lewis’s narrator opines that “a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.” Carol is a reformer who wants to uplift the social and intellectual life of Gopher Prairie, injecting into the community a healthy dose of art, science, and freethinking. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.”Įven if her contemporaries aren’t remotely on her wavelength, Carol’s optimism and high spirits still count for something.
We first see her standing on a hill in the sun, arms wide open, “credulous, plastic, young drinking the air as she longed to drink life. Lewis clearly wants the reader to like her, and it’s very easy to. We follow the spunky and idealistic Carol Kennicott, a recent graduate of Blodgett College, “a bulwark of sound religion still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire and Darwin,” where “pious families” send their children to “protect them from the wickedness of the universities.” Despite her primly conservative background, Carol has developed an evangelical zeal. Lewis knew whereof he spoke, having grown up restless in a Minnesota town much like the fictional Gopher Prairie, whose inhabitants live staid, complacent lives with no curiosity about the world beyond their white picket fences. Lewis’s eye is as jaundiced as Flaubert’s or Flannery O’Connor’s as he maps out the intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac of small-town life. This is a bit ironic, given how relentlessly cynical the novel is about its subject. SINCLAIR LEWIS’S MAIN STREET, which turns 100 this year, was a blockbuster best seller when it was published in 1920.
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