It's been nearly a century since Sinclair Lewis, the novelist from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, won the Nobel Prize in literature.
The year was 1930, and Lewis was the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel - and at the time, his winning made a lot of people unhappy.
Driving through Sauk Centre made me realize how much things have changed. Now a special Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center greets the incoming traveler. Oversized green and white street signs proclaim "The Original Main Street." Everywhere you look you see reminders of "Red" Lewis - once the most hated man in town.
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“Main Street, ” Lewis’s sixth novel, was published in 1920. It was an overnight sensation, making its author both famous and infamous. As his biographer, Mark Schorer, later wrote, the book’s phenomenal success “was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history.”
Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis’s most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921 alone, the book sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years sales were estimated at two million (this at a time when the total U.S. population was only 106 million, instead of the 300-plus we now have).
As Lewis’s book swept the country, the picture of small-town America changed dramatically.
Prior to the publication of “Main Street,” village life had generally been described by American writers as the embodiment of innocence, good, sweetness, noble suffering and fulfillment, as opposed to the cruelties and frustration and brutalities of city life. (This view, of course, is still strongly held by some; among its most vocal proponents are those who have never read books like “Main Street.”)
But life in Lewis's fictional town of Gopher Prairie is far from rosy. Battered by blizzards in the winter, scorched by the merciless summer sun, Gopher Prairie stands a long way west of Eden.
Its houses are pictured as low and shabby, and because the town lacks sewers and street cleaners, it stinks. Its citizens are shown as smug and self-satisfied, ignorant and mindlessly in love with motorcars. Conformity is king; one fits into Gopher Prairie by dint of one's provincialism, narrowness of view and materialistic yearnings.
To the town comes Carol Kennicott, wife of the local doctor, a young woman filled with rebellious emotions. She wants to reform the town, inside and out, but fails completely, almost going under in the process. At the end of the book, life goes on pretty much as it did in the beginning.
As a description of life in a small town, “Main Street ” is certainly one of the best ever written. A careful reading reveals much that Lewis found admirable: the land itself, the sense of rootedness and belonging, the perseverance and resigned tolerance that Doc Kennicott exhibits in the face of much personal disappointment.
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But it took the folks at Sauk Centre a good many years to outgrow their initial outrage toward the author - and the fact that they were outraged to begin with indicates just how accurate Lewis's portrayal was.
His criticisms hit home for the simple reason that they were truthful, and the reactions they provoked only served to underscore that fact. That the good citizens of Sauk Centre responded to their fictional portrayal with peevishness and self-righteous anger must have saddened Lewis immensely, and contributed to his latter years sense of being a man without a true home.
“Main Street ” was a love letter from its author to his people. He couldn't and wouldn't have written it had he not cared deeply about the people pictured therein.
The sad part is that it resulted in a lover's quarrel that lasted much longer than was healthy for either Lewis or the people of his prairie town.
Collections of Craig Nagel’s columns are available at CraigNagelBooks.com.
