A review by lwvalentine55
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

5.0

This was another book in my quest to read all of the bestsellers of the last 100 years, and it was a delight. As a person who loves historical fiction, I find it rather fun to read "current" fiction that has become historical. I don't give a lot of five star reviews, but I feel like this one deserves it. The writing was fluid and compelling, and although Lewis quite obviously used his heroine, Carol Kennicott, as a vehicle to criticize small-town living and small-minded communities, he made lots of interesting points and I found myself underling passages quite frequently. A lot of what he wrote about still jibes with American society today. I live in what qualifies as a small town, 100 years later, and I know that there are still people who think exactly as the people of Gopher Prairie do - along with people who think exactly as Carol Kennicott does. They wanted to hang on to the old ways, and she wanted to move forward. Though the fundamentals of this struggle remain the same, I believe we have made significant progress in the years since Sinclair Lewis wrote this, and I think Carol Kennicott would have been much happier today than she was in the novel. She was very, very stuck in Gopher Prairie, held captive by a small group of deeply judgmental friends and neighbors and cut off from the rhythm and the flow of the rest of the world. Radio, television and the Internet have changed things substantially, making it easer for people to live the way they want and pursue the passions that they want from anywhere in the country.