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- Main Street is a colloquial term used by economists to refer collectively to America's independent small businesses. It gets its name from a common name for the principal commercial street of small towns across the country. In England, the equivalent term is High Street.
www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mainstreet.aspMain Street: Meaning, Types, Government Programs - Investopedia
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Main Street, novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. The story of Main Street is filtered through the eyes of Carol Kennicott, a young woman married to a Midwestern doctor who settles in the Minnesota town of Gopher Prairie (modeled on Lewis’s hometown of Sauk Centre). The book’s power derives.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sinclair Lewis's first acknowledged classic, Main Street remains a timeless indictment of the prejudices and complacency of small-town America. His protagonist, Carol Kennicott, is an educated, progressive-minded city girl who marries a dull doctor, then relocates to the tiny burg of Gopher Falls.
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Overview. Main Street, published in 1920 by American author Sinclair Lewis, is a novel that satirizes small-town life in the United States. The story follows Carol Milford, a young woman who marries a doctor and moves to the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Media Adaptations
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
Main Street, originally published in 1920, is the story of a sophisticated young woman who moves to a small town in the American Midwest in 1912 and struggles against the small-minded culture of the citizens who live there. The town, Gopher Prairie, is closely patterned on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, which is where Sinclair Lewisgrew up, although the b...
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town on the Central Plains that provided the inspiration for Main Street's Gopher Prairie. His father was a physician and, like Will Kennicott in the novel, was excessively concerned with appearances and proud of the rugged simplicity of his neighbors. Growing up, Lewis knew t...
Part I
Main Street concerns the struggle faced by a free-minded woman, Carol Kennicott, who has been raised to be artistic and inquisitive but is confined to life in a small town on the Minnesota plains. The book opens with Carol in college in Minneapolis, full of lofty aspirations that even her classmates find intimidating. After receiving her degree, she lives in Chicago for a year before taking a job in the public library in St. Paul. After three years, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott at a party at...
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street Revisited is a 1998 videocassette from Thomas S. Klise Company. It includes photos of Lewis and his boyhood home and examines his most popular books, Main Street and Bab...Sinclair Lewis: The Man from Main Street is a 1986 videocassette produced by WBGU of Bowling Green, Ohio, and distributed by Ohio Humanities Resource Center.Books on Tape, Inc., produced an audiocassette version of Main Street(slightly edited) in 1987. It is packaged in two parts, each part includes seven cassettes.An unabridged version of Main Street, read by Barbara Caruso, is available from Audio Books, Inc., and can be downloaded from Amazon. com's audio division, Audible.com.Miles Bjornstam
Bjornstam is a socialist, an opponent of those who make money off the labor of others. Friends and enemies refer to him as "The Red Swede." Carol is attracted to him as a friend because he is one of the few people in Gopher Prairie who is not afraid to speak openly against the stringent social order. He works odd jobs and travels when he wants, until he marries Carol's maid, Bea. He then starts a dairy but does not get along with his customers or neighbors. When Bea is dying, he chases away a...
James Blausser
Blausser is a land speculator who comes to Gopher Prairie and starts a campaign to increase civic pride in order to attract people to the town. He is an exciting speaker—Lewis describes him as "a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real estate." His "booster" campaign is so superficial in its unreal praise of the town that it disgusts Carol, especially when her husband compares it to her own desire to make the town better.
Cyrus Bogart
Cyrus, who goes by Cy, is a teenager who lives with his widowed mother near the Kennicott house. As a teenager, he commits small pranks on his neighbors, the Kennicotts, throwing tomatoes at their house and putting frightening pictures in the windows. Once, going into her garage, Carol overhears Cy talking to another boy, mocking the way she goes about her chores, as he has observed while peeping in her windows. Later, he goes out with Fern Mullins, the schoolteacher who is boarding at his ho...
Prairie Life
To some extent, the attitudes that prevail in the book's fictional setting, Gopher Prairie, are a result of the town's geological circumstances. As Lewis makes clear, the towns scattered across the North American Great Plainsplateau were set off in virtual isolation from the rest of the world before the twentieth century. At the time when the novel takes place, from 1912 to 1920, automobiles were unreliable, with thin, smooth tires that offered little traction in wet or snowy conditions and s...
In the last chapters of the novel, Carol lives in Washington among suffragists. Research the women's suffrage movement between 1915 and 1920 and relate the movement's political goals to the lives t...Just how isolated was Gopher Prairie? Find out the distance from Minneapolis to Sauk Centre, the town that Gopher Prairie is based on, and then research how long it would take a train to travel tha...Research women's fashions from the time when this novel takes place, finding examples of clothes that would have been common and ones that would have been considered artistic and ornate, such as Er...What was the gas that was used against American troops in World War I? What effect would it have had on someone like Raymie Wutherspoon, who still suffered from it when he came home from the war?Point of View
Most of Main Streetis told from a third person, limited omniscient point of view. It is third person because the narrative voice is not that of one of the characters who appears in the book: the speaker never refers to himself or herself as "I" but, instead, always relates the actions of the characters in terms of what "he" or "she" did or said. It is an omniscient voice because it has access to human thoughts and is not just limited to describing objective reality as it could be observed by...
Foil
A foil is a character whose function in a novel is to help readers understand the character of another by holding the opposite values. In this book, Aunt Bessie Smail functions as a foil for Carol because she sees the world from an entirely different perspective. Aunt Bessie supports old-fashioned values, conventional morality, subservience of women to their husbands, and anti-Semitism; she is opposed to farmers' cooperatives, divorce, and liquor. Bessie and her husband, Whittier, whose views...
The Rise of the Middle Class
The American middle class, a category that most citizens fall into today, developed during the period marked by the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the start of World War Iin 1914. During that time, the development of industry and the westward expansion across the North American continent provided opportunities for wealth on scales previously unheard of. Key industries, such as steel, petroleum, banking, and railroads, were controlled by a few individuals who established monopolies, fixing p...
1920: The year that Main Street is published, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution grants the vote to women. Today: Voting rightsare strictly enforced. Women are considered a powerful polit...1920s: The first commercial radio broadcast signal is sent out of KDKA in East Pittsburgh, using a technology that will eventually allow people from coast to coast to share a common experience simu...1920s: A town like Gopher Prairie could hire an advertising consultant to design a brochure that exaggerates the town's features, hoping to lure prospective businesses. Today:Small towns are even m...1920: The national prohibition against alcohol, mentioned in the novel's final pages, goes into effect on January 16, in accordance with the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prohibiti...Main Street is a novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920. Satirizing small-town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis's most famous book and led in part to his eventual 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Sinclair Lewis
- 1920
Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott is a satiric attack on small-town life. In the 1920’s, a large component of America’s middle class sought a more liberal identity. The novel depicts...
Oct 7, 2024 · Carol Kennicott is the central character in Main Street and experiences the harshest disillusionment as she contrasts her ideals with reality. As an outsider and former librarian, Carol moves...
