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document that toppled a number of dearly held American myths: that in the midwestern United States, and there only, is to be found God’s Country; that “broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose” (p. 350); that the American small town had achieved a level of perfect and simple democracy unknown to older and more effete societies; that institutions such as “Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race” (p. 437) are recipes for general happiness rather than tyrannical enforcers of arbitrary norms. Main Street lanced the bubble of self-satisfaction that had formed around provincial American culture, and cast mockery and doubt on Middle America’s creed, formulated at the opening of the novel:

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters ... whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.

Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God’s Country.

Sinclair Lewis could not have written of Gopher Prairie with such a potent combination of love, hate, affection, and contempt had he not been a product of it himself. A native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a prairie town that had a population of some 1,200 at the time of his birth in 1885, Lewis knew his subject intimately—too intimately, perhaps; it was not until he revisited his hometown with his bride, a city girl like Main Street’s Carol Kennicott, and saw it, as though for the first time, through her alien and feminine eyes, that he was able to move ahead with the vague idea for a novel about small-town life that had been haunting his imagination for years.

As early as 1905, when he was still a college student at Yale, the germ of what was to become Main Street was born in him during a series of conversations with Charles Dorion, a dreamy, bookish lawyer who was dissatisfied with life in Sauk Centre but too passive to move on. In his diary Lewis recorded their talks, dubbing Dorion’s disaffection “the village virus.” “I shall have to write a book of how it getteth into the veins of good men & true. ‘God made the country & man made the town—but the devil made the village.’ Where in the city one would see a friend or go to the theatre, in Sauk Centre there is nothing to do save drink or play poker (for those who do not read much)” (quoted in Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, p. 24). Later Lewis claimed that at that time he had written 20,000 words of a novel he called “The Village Virus,” but no trace of this aborted work remains.

But the idea for Main Street continued to percolate over the course of the next decade, during which time he published three novels, a boys’ adventure story, and a good many short stories. Then, after several years in New York as a Greenwich Village bohemian, Lewis went to visit Sauk Centre with his new wife, Gracie. He noticed Gracie’s reactions to things he had always taken for granted: as, for example, when she attended a meeting of the Gradatim Club (which would become the Thanatopsis Club in Main Street), and they discussed their literary agenda for the following year, deciding to devote their entire course of study to the Bible.

The visit almost magically refocused his thoughts, and he suddenly knew how the novel must evolve. The Charles Dorion character, whom he had named Guy Pollock, retreated into the background and the novel’s central intelligence became a woman, based in large part on Gracie: the fastidious, artistic Carol Kennicott, full of real dreams and ambitions, and just as full of silly affectations and vanities—a perfect foil for ugly, utilitarian Gopher Prairie.

In much the same way that Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, used the heroine’s romantic expectations to emphasize the banality of her actual experiences, Lewis used Carol’s fantasies