Lewis knew whereof he spoke, having grown up restless in a Minnesota town much like the fictional Gopher Prairie, whose inhabitants live staid, complacent lives with no curiosity about the world beyond their white picket fences. Lewis’s eye is as jaundiced as Flaubert’s or Flannery O’Connor’s as he maps out the intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac of small-town life. This is a bit ironic, given how relentlessly cynical the novel is about its subject. SINCLAIR LEWIS’S MAIN STREET, which turns 100 this year, was a blockbuster best seller when it was published in 1920.
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