When I was in graduate school studying British and American literature, I accumulated books–lots of books, mainly consisting of literature, literary criticism, and history, and including a small collection of books by Midwestern writers. I remember in particular having a lot of Booth Tarkington and Sinclair Lewis novels in hardcover. They were not hard to come by at book sales and used bookstores.

As time went on and I moved nearly every year, and as a career in academia failed to materialize, I gradually unburdened myself of many books. I sold off lots of literary theory books without remorse. I got rid of many of my Midwestern books with not much more regret, because I hadn’t read the vast majority of them. I did, however, keep two of Lewis’s novels, Main Street and Babbitt, feeling that they were important. I had read Babbitt when in high school and was not extremely taken with it. Of Minnesota authors, I preferred Scott Fitzgerald.

Over the years I continued to come across references to Main Street as an important American novel, and I was nagged by the sense that I needed to read it. Finally, I picked it up off a bookshelf at home and started reading.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of the book, but it was probably in Minnesota. Just inside the cover it’s stamped “Joseph K. Kidder, Lacrosse, Wis.”; the typography of the stamp is in the Art Deco style of the 1920’s. The copyright page indicates the novel was first published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, but my copy of the book was published by Grosset and Dunlap of New York in 1922–the thirty-first printing, not too bad for two years, and just one indication of the book’s success. The book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; a jury voted to give the award to Main Street, but the Columbia University trustees overruled it to grant the prize to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. Angered, Lewis would later refuse the Pulitzer in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith. By 1922 the book had also been made into a silent film. My edition comes complete with illustrations from “the photoplay,” “a Warner Brothers screen classic.” (The novel was made into a movie again in 1936, titled I Married a Doctor.)

I finished the book not long ago, and I found it to be an eloquent novel of sharp social observation that is still relevant today. It doesn’t surprise me that it was so successful in its day, nor that Sinclair Lewis–a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota–would receive the Nobel Prize for literature only ten years later, after publishing four more novels in the 1920’s that, with Main Street, are generally considered to be among his best work: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).

In the next week or more I’ll look in detail at Lewis’s novel about life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and its relevance for us today.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 5:49 am and is filed under Books/Literature, Minnesota.