• American Literature
• Novels

• Type: Novel
• Length: 448 pages

• Derivative: The Perfectionist (drawing), Drawing

Main Street is a 1920 novel by American author Sinclair Lewis that reportedly satirizes American small-town life. The protagonist, Carol Milford of St Paul, marries doctor Will Kennicott and moves to the fictional small-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

For context, the 1920 US Census revealed for the first time in American history, more people lived in urban areas than in rural areas and small towns, with 54.3 million in urban areas compared to 51.4 million rural. At the time, the US Census Bureau defined any incorporated area with more than 2,500 residents as urban. Highly acclaimed upon publication, Main Street became the best-selling American novel of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The 1937 special edition of Main Street, published by The Limited Editions Club and enlivened by nine illustrations from notable Iowa painter Grant Wood, is now a collectible. Each of the 1,500 copies printed was hand-numbered and signed by Wood. Designed by William A Kittredge, the volume was printed on tan Arak paper and bound in gray cloth at the Lakeside Press in Chicago. Wood specified tan rag paper and blue-and-yellow linen binding to evoke the American Midwest. Original 1937 copies in good condition, complete with their slipcases, typically range from $250 to $600 depending on wear. - AsNotedIn

This is America - a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
The town is, in our tale called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." But its main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and up not very differently would be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

Places

• Minneapolis, Minnesota She saw no Indians now she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.
• Minnesota, United States of America Blodgett College is on the edge of Minnesota.
• St Paul, MN, Minnesota A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow ties, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St Paul stockyards.
• United States of America, The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and up not very differently would be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.