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2. Lewis gives the reader many concrete details in his descriptions of Gopher Prairie. Does he always mean these details to be taken in a literal sense, or are they sometimes symbolic?

3. What details does Lewis omit that would exist in a place like Gopher Prairie?

4. Does reading Main Street clarify forces, attitudes, or types of people that are still with us today? If so, what or who would they be?

5. The novel implies that Main Street is the American norm, and that other places or institutions—Greenwich Village in New York City, Hollywood, the Ivy League, and the Smoky Mountains, for example—are deviations from that norm. What do you think?

6. English writer John Galsworthy once remarked that every country has its Main Streets. What distinguishes the American Main Street?

FOR FURTHER READING

Biographies

Lewis, Sinclair. The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader. Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904-1950. Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random House, 1953.

Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.

Lundquist, James. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill, 1961.

Sheean, Vincent. Dorothy and Red. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

Van Doren, Carl. Sinclair Lewis : A Biographical Sketch. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933.

Criticism

Bloom, Harold, ed. Sinclair Lewis : Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Bucco, Martin. Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Bucco, Martin, ed. Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Hutchisson, James M., ed. Sinclair Lewis : New Essays in Criticism. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1997.

Schorer, Mark, ed. Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962.

Letters

Koblas, John J., and Dave Page, eds. Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis. Madison, WI: Main Street Press, 1985.

Lewis, Sinclair. From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930. Edited and with an introduction by Harrison Smith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

Other Books of Interest

De Kruif, Paul. The Sweeping Wind, A Memoir. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

Kurth, Peter. American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

Lewis, Grace Hegger. With Love from Gracie: Sinclair Lewis: 1912-1915. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.

Mencken, H. L. My Life as Author and Editor. Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Yardley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Nobel Foundation Website

Lewis’s autobiographical sketch for the Nobel Committee can be read on the Nobel Foundation’s website, on the page accessed with this address: http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-autobio.html

Lewis’s speech accepting the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature can be read on the Nobel Foundation’s website, on the page accessed with this address: http://www nobel.se/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-lecture.html

a

Corruption of Ojibwa, the name of a Native American tribe that lived in the regions around Lake Superior.

b

Eugene Brieux (1858-1932), French playwright who wrote on current social problems.

c

Free-thinking American lawyer and orator (1833-1899), nicknamed “the Great Agnostic.”

d

The Boston was a one-step waltz popular in the early 1900s.

e

The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions recruited students as Protestant missionaries in Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

f

Decorated with a pattern burned on with hot instruments.

g

The Elsie Dinsmore books, a series of children’s novels (begun in 1867) by Martha Farquharson Finley.

h

“Bath mat” spelled backward.