Main Street
1920
She came to reform Main Street. Main Street had other plans. Carol Milford, a willful Minnesota farm girl who studied at a conservative college and fell for the town doctor, arrives in Gopher Prairie with visions of transforming it into something beautiful, something alive. She has ideas about architecture and books and art and progressive thinking. What she finds is a town that takes its cues from the Jolly Seventeen Ladies' Club and considers the druggist's soda fountain the height of sophistication. Sinclair Lewis captures the specific anguish of idealism meeting inertia, of a bright mind suffocating in a place that mistake boredom for stability. Carol's struggles are sometimes comic, sometimes painful, always recognizably American. The book asks what happens when someone looks at their surroundings and asks, quietly or loudly, "Is this all there is?" It remains essential not because the answer has changed, but because the question hasn't.
Editions
X-Ray
“I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now”
— Sinclair Lewis
“Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.””
— Sinclair Lewis
“They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always peddlers or pants-makers."Where does she get all them theories?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!””
— Sinclair Lewis
“No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.””
— Sinclair Lewis
“She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.””
— Sinclair Lewis
“It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.””
— Sinclair Lewis
“If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil.””
— Sinclair Lewis
“I think perhaps we want a more conscientious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of always deferring hope to the next generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now - and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is - everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We sha'n't get it. So we sha'n't ever be content -””
— Sinclair Lewis
“What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?””
— Sinclair Lewis
