Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [3]
1933 Ann Vickers is published, and a film version of the novel is released.
1934 Work of Art is published. Lewis collaborates with Sidney Howard on the theatrical version of Dodsworth, which receives critical acclaim when it premieres. A film version of Babbitt is released.
1935 It Can’t Happen Here and Selected Short Stories are published.
1936 A Hollywood film version of Dodsworth, for which Lewis receives writing credit, is released.
1936- 1942 Lewis writes several plays and acts in a few of them.
1938 The Prodigal Parents is published.
1940 Bethel Merriday is published.
1941 Japanese warplanes attack Pearl Harbor on December 7. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declares war on Japan the following day.
1942 Lewis divorces Dorothy Thompson. He begins to spend most of his time in Europe.
1943 Gideon Planish is published.
1944 Lewis’s son Wells, a lieutenant in World War II, is killed by a sniper in the Piedmont Valley of France.
1945 World War II ends. Cass Timberlane is published.
1947 Kingsblood Royal is published. A film version of Cass Timberlane, starring Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner, is released.
1949 The God-seeker is published.
1951 On January 10 Lewis dies in Rome of heart disease. World So Wide is published posthumously.
1960 The Hollywood film version of Elmer Gantry, starring Burt Lancaster in the title role, is released.
INTRODUCTION
Main Street is one of those very rare novels that, with the force of its impact on the population, becomes a national event rather than just a literary one. In its day, everyone read Main Street; within months of its publication in 1920 the very title had become a by-word for provincialism and narrow-mindedness. Its obscure author quickly became one of the most famous writers in the world, a notorious scourge of polite convention and accepted pieties. As the critic and poet Malcolm Cowley later commented,
Our normal book-buying public consists, perhaps, of two or three hundred thousand people. When a novel passes the latter figure, it is being purchased by families in the remoter villages, families which acquire no more than ten books in a generation. In the year 1921, if you visited the parlor of almost any boarding house, you would see a copy of “Main Street” standing between the Bible and “Ben-Hur” (Brentano’s. “Book Chat, ”May/June 1927, p. 26).
Defying the conventional wisdom that novels about small towns sell poorly, Main Street soared to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there. Only a few months after its publication, sales had reached 100,000, and they continued at a high rate. It became the best-selling American novel for the entire 1900 to 1925 period, and probably the most influential as well. As the novelist and critic Ludwig Lewisohn commented, “perhaps no novel since ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ had struck so deep over so wide a surface of the national life” (Expression in America, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1932).
One of the reasons Main Street made such an immediate impression was that it spoke for so many people. In 1920 the majority of native-born adult Americans had grown up in small towns or rural areas, despite the demographic shift to cities that was beginning to take place. Most of the novel’s readers had intimate knowledge of their own particular Main Street, which was usually not so very different from Gopher Prairie’s; as Sinclair Lewis writes in the novel, Gopher Prairie is not only its distinct self, but “ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego” (p. 37). Main Street told the literal truth about many thousands of American lives, and readers recognized themselves and their world. “Some hundreds of thousands read the book,” Lewis later commented, “with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth” (autobiographical sketch for the Nobel Committee; see “For Further Reading”). “I lived every page of Main Street for fifteen years,” one female reader wrote, with feeling (quoted in Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930, p. 44; see “For Further Reading”).
It was an intensely liberating