Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [1]
“We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.” (page 430)
Published by Barnes & Noble Books 122 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011 www.barnesandnoble.com/classics
Main Street was first published in 1920.
Originally published in mass market format in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.
This trade paperback edition published in 2008.
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2003 by Brooke Allen.
Note on Sinclair Lewis, The World of Sinclair Lewis and Main Street, Inspired by Main Street, and Comments & Questions Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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Main Street
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-386-1 ISBN-10: 1-59308-386-6
eISBN : 978-1-411-43262-8
LC Control Number 2007941528
Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher
Printed in the United States of America
QM
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FIRST PRINTING
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, an immigrant farming village with a population of little more than a thousand. When he was six years old, his mother died; his father, a country doctor, remarried a year later. Lewis’s early experiences living in a rural midwestern town would influence much of his writing; Main Street’s Gopher Prairie, for example, is modeled after Sauk Centre and features many of the community organizations in which his stepmother participated.
In 1903 Lewis moved east to attend Yale University, where he began contributing regularly to the Yale Literary Magazine. He became dissatisfied with college life, however, and dropped out in 1906 to work as a janitor in the utopian community Helicon Hall. Founded by Upton Sinclair, Helicon Hall was a mecca for progressive thinkers of the time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lewis left after two months and spent the next few years working at odd jobs before returning to Yale to graduate in 1908.
Lewis traveled around the country for two years, and then settled in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a center for avant-garde artists and writers. He worked in publishing during the day and spent his evenings writing short stories and novels. His first book, a boys’ adventure story titled Hike and the Aeroplane, was published in 1912.
In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger and the couple moved to Port Washington, on Long Island. Lewis became editor and advertising manager at the George H. Doran Publishing Company. He continued to devote his evenings to writing fiction, and when the publication of a story in the Saturday Evening Post proved lucrative, Lewis quit his job to become a full-time novelist.
The 1920 publication of Main Street marked the beginning of Lewis’s international acclaim as a satirical novelist. An instant best-seller, Main Street sold more than 250,000 copies by the end of its first year of publication. Lewis quickly followed this success with several other well-received novels—Babbitt (1922), about an unhappy businessman wanting more in his life; Arrowsmith (1925), about an idealistic doctor and researcher; and Elmer Gantry (1927), a send-up of an evangelical scam artist. In 1926 Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith. He declined to accept the prize, stating that his novel did not meet the “wholesome” standards of the committee.
Lewis married the well-known journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1928, having divorced his first wife, Grace, earlier that