Main Street Analysis

The bulk of this novel takes place in the small fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Lewis did such a convincing job describing this town that ever since this book appeared, Gopher Prairie...

95% of this book, you could say that Main Street features a limited third-person perspective, given that it seems to follow only the thoughts and actions of one character—Carol Kennicott. Yet the...

The genre of Main Street can make for interesting discussion. Today, many people think of the book as a great example of satire because of the way it exposes the people of Gopher Prairie to ridicul...

Even when he's trying to be dead serious, Sinclair Lewis can't help but mock the parts of people's personalities that he finds lacking, shallow, or downright bad. When describing the arrival of a p...

It's fair to say that Sinclair Lewis's writing style reflects the world as Carol Kennicott would like it to be—filled with pretty, descriptive language. At the beginning of the book, this languag...

Although the title might seem busy at first, it's unlikely that Sinclair Lewis could have found a better way to express the tension that Carol Kennicott feels throughout this book. The tension we'r...

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 con...

"But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do...

Sinclair Lewis's poetic language can be really tough to follow at times. As if that weren't bad enough, the plot of Main Street can get really, really dull. It's all part of Lewis' effort to show u...

Carol Milford begins this book attending college and dreaming great dreams about how she's going to change the world. But that all hits a snag when she marries Dr. Will Kennicott and moves with him...

Carol Milford begins this book with great anticipation about how her life is going to turn out and all the adventures she's going to have. But once she gets married, she realizes that she has com...

Carol Kennicott graduates from college with big dreams of changing the world. But that all goes south when she marries Dr. Will Kennicott and moves with him to the dull town of Gopher Prairie. Caro...

Sinclair Lewis won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith in 1926, but he refused the award. The dude either hated the idea of artistic competition, or he was just mad that he hadn...

There might be a smooch or two in this book, but Sinclair Lewis was never going to give his readers the ammunition they needed to ignore his criticism of small-town America. If he had put sex into...

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