Main Street

Main Street is a novel by the American writer Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920.

Carol Milford is a college graduate with a taste for books and reform who marries a doctor and goes with him to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a small town modelled on the writer's own home town. She arrives intending to improve things: the library, the houses, the way people treat each other and the dullness of the social life. What she meets is a town with a fixed idea of how its women should behave and a habit of punishing anyone who differs, and she spends years working out how much of herself she can keep. Lewis wrote the book as a satire on small-town conformity and commercialism, and it made his name; it was turned into a play and a film within a few years of publication.

Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, and Main Street was the novel that first brought him a wide readership in America and abroad, and the one that established the fictional state he kept returning to.