Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Horrible edition! Do not select this edition!

Full of typos, errors, starting on the copyright page. A complete disaster of an edition.

5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

DON'T READ!!!!

This book was a waist of my life. It is about a girl who wants to live in the city, but marries a small town doctor. She moves to the small town and everybody hates her and she thinks she is better than them because she is from the city. Then, when people start to like her, she has an affair then people hate her. After she moves to the city and her husband comes and takes her back the the small town.

3 out of 9 people found this review helpful.

As valid today as it was 80 years ago.

A fasinating read. The frustrations of those ordinary people of 4 generations ago rings true today.Carol Kennicott is an educated young lady who faces the tedious agony of everyday life in Gopher Prairie Minn.She struggles with the driving desire to impact the world in a significant way or accepting her current safe but impossibly unrewarding life as wife and mother.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A forgotten American classic

Greetings! Sinclair Lewis is one of the most under-rated American authors of the 20th century.He was a keen observer of middle America,life in the heartland.He was of Norwegin birth,and understood neighboring Sweden's military role in history.He is one of two dozen writers ,who knew the real story of the Lindbergh kidnapping.Harold Olson was the real Charles Lindbergh Jr.--I would highly recommend any of Lewis' great works, such as Babbit and Arrowsmith.Enjoy!from Mike McKenna.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Small Towns Can Be Depressing

In 1905, 37 year old lawyer Paul Percy Harris created the Rotary Club of Chicago and launched the Service Club movement. His explicit goal was to transplant to huge, cut-throat, impersonal, low- standard Chicago the best features of friendly, uplifting, prospering, moral Wallingford, Vermont (population 1,000) where Harris had grown up. In 1920 appeared MAIN STREET, a novel by 35 year old Harry Sinclair Lewis. The novel's most obvious goal was to alert America to the negative, under-achieving, soul-shrinking aspects of small towns, particularly of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (population 7,000). *** Trailing glorious memories of Judge Milford, her wise father and of her childhood home in Mankato, Minnesota, Carol Milford married a man a dozen years her senior, Will Kennicott, M.D., and moved with him to Gopher Prairie. Her father, who died when Carol was a teen, was a Massachusetts man, 'smiling and shabby, ... learned and teasingly kind.' And Mankato 'is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn' (MAIN STREET, Ch. I) In college the orphaned Carol had discovered a dreamy bent for sociology and town-planning. These experiences she brought to her wedding and to her move from St. Paul where she worked as a librarian to Gopher Prairie, population 7,000. The mixture of past, present and future proved unstable in Carol Kennicott. *** Will Kennicott was not the intellectual that Carol Milford Kennicott's father had been. Will was a plodding, ordinary, hard-working country doctor. The most intellectually daring thing he ever did was to admire volatile, questing Carol and persuade her to marry him. Gopher Prairie was no transplanted Athens (as Carol remembered Mankato). And Gopher Prairie and its Main Street, representing thousands of similar American small towns, were unplanned, ugly, dirty, uncultured and a parasite on surrounding rural areas and farmers. Carol Kennicott set out to reform husband, town and 'denizens.' She played an idealistic, reforming Mary to her friend Vida Sherwin's more practical Martha. Carol sought to transform the village's architecture, school, and culture and create a sense of civic solidarity among its wealthier leaders. Her blitzkriegs all failed in the short run. But behind the scenes, with an eye to the long haul, over the years Vida Sherwin patiently won a new school. *** Meanwhile, the Kennicott marriage was neither a partnership in which husband and wife pooled resources behind the same profession nor a happy home built around a burgeoning nursery. Doctor Will retained an all male coterie of duck- hunting, tobacco-spitting friends, notably the merchant Sam Clark, 'dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators and almost every kind of heavy junk you can think of' (Ch. III). The closest Carol was permitted to that circle was when Will bade her serve them food and drink on poker nights. *** Towards novel's end, yearning for freedom, a job, intellectual stimulus and romance, Carol took her three year old son off to Washington, DC in October 1918, a month before the end of World War One. There she experienced both the excitement of socializing with richly experienced, creative adults as well as the dullness of a Government office job. After a taste of strikers and the women's suffrage leaders, a more realistic Carol returned to husband, Gopher Prairie and Main Street. *** Sinclair Lewis went on to write BABBITT and other books mocking the transplanted devotion to small towns created by Rotary, Boosters, Kiwanis and other men's organizations. The duel goes on to this day, with idealized Mankato, Minnesota and Wallingord, Vermont rebuking a spirit-crushing Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and between Paul Percy Harris and Harry SInclair Lewis. *** -OOO-

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

OK - Not one of my favorites

I really struggled through this one and was waiting for the big message or idea. No big wows or insights. Main Street was supposed to be a favorite in the early 1900's. It probably applied to small town USA during the period. Though at times interesting, I found most of it to be rather dull. In the end, I wasn't sure if Gopher Prairie had the problem or if the problem layed strictly with Carolyn - maybe both.

Mimi

How r u

Lizzy

I want you to myself go to:13 result

Jad

Good hbu?

Lila

Zzzzzzzxz

Ril

Sighs..

Flame

Pshhhhh im likin this jonathan HES THE ONLY GUY WHO ACTUALLY HAS SENCE!

Jonathan

Sure...

Emma

Walks to scarlet letter...

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Ookay book

This was okay

Great book

I wish I had not read it, so I can discover it again!

Sinclair Lewis could be describing social and political divides in 2010

The book is a bit of a slog. . .too long, too detailed. The characters are not particularly real, but as stereotypes we recognize some of every character in ourselves and people we know. It's interesting to ponder--who was the hero? All characters had foolish and sympathetic characteristics. Most amazing is the universality of political and social ideas. The divide in political and social ideas of American culture fall on the same fissures 100 years later--the more things change the more they stay the same!

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Vacuous Respectability Exposed by Lewis

Main Street, although not widely read anymore, is not simply an indictment of the 'vacuous respectability' (Lewis' term) of small town American in the early 20th century; it is also an dramatization of the conflict between those who wish to live intensely, such as Carol, the wife, and those who are comfortable with boring quotidian routine, such as Dr. Kennicot, the husband, as well as nearly all the other townspeople of Gopher Prairie. There is a lot of powerful writing here and incredible perspicacity on the part of Lewis into the unromantic aspects of marriage. I recommend a resuscitation of this wonderful novel.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Being smothered by small town life

Sinclair Lewis' first novel is an eyeopener to life in a small mid-Western town during the first two decades of the 20th century. Reading this book 82 years after it was first published made me realize how lucky I am to have been born during the last half of the 20th century and have grown up in and continue to live in urban areas (and enjoy the anonymity they offer). I sympathized with Carol Kennicott's dismay at being stuck in Gopher Prairie and at her unending efforts to sophisticate the town. Unfortunately, she was up against the narrow-mindedness and gossipy nature of its citizenry, the lack of support from her contemporaries, and the general cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie. Lewis weaves a tale of frustration and disappointment for Carol and the handful of characters, who like her, really don't belong. The 'good citizens' of Gopher Prairie are smug and insensitive as they look down on the immigrant farmers and laborers who do the real work in the community. The 'I got mine and to hell with you' attitude is amazing from those who believe they are charitable because they roll bandages during WWI while ignoring what's going on around them in their own town. But then as long as their pockets are being stuffed through the efforts of others, who cares? Main Street is a good read but full of some of the most irritating characters you'll ever come across in a novel. This novel is a good choice for book groups because it provokes a lot of conversation. I suggested it to mine and it did just that.