Sinclair Lewis was a remarkable figure in American literature. In 1930, he became the first American to be honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The citation for his award lauded his "vigorous and graphic art of description" and his remarkable ability to create, with great wit and humor, new and unique types of characters. His most renowned novels, Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), have left a lasting impact.

Main Street, when first published in 1920, caused quite a stir in small town America. It ruffled the feathers of many, and nearly a century later, it still has the power to affect some readers in the same way. Sinclair Lewis crafted this savage satire as a scathing indictment of small town life in the early 20th century. During that time, prairie life was patriotically idealized as being wholesome and honorable. However, Lewis saw small towns in a very different light. He regarded them as claustrophobic, narrow-minded, anti-intellectual, mean-spirited, and conformist. He coined the term "The Village Virus" to describe the power of small town life to inculcate its citizens with enervating and shallow values. The story's focus is on whether the outsider, Carol, will yield to the influence of Main Street or not. The choice of Carol as the central character means that Main Street also delves into the same territory of female aspirations and limited career choices as Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), which adds an extra layer of interest to Lewis's primary critique.

To read the remainder of my review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

I read and blogged my review of Main Street in July 2011. Lisa Hill, Melbourne, Australia

Bye! This is the most boring book I have ever read. I feel like I aged 20 years just by reading it. The story lacks excitement and the characters are flat. There is no real plot to speak of, and it just drones on and on. I found myself constantly losing interest and having to force myself to keep reading. I would not recommend this book to anyone. It is a waste of time and money. I hope that the author will do better next time and write a more engaging and interesting story.

When I cut about fifty pages of the novel, I began to feel that I was on the verge of reading something similar to Madame Bovary's novel, which tells the story of the village doctor's dreamy wife, and that was the same situation as Carol in Main Street. And although my attitude towards Madame Bovary's novel was moderate, I was about to give up Main Street because I had never immersed myself in a fictional personality as much as I hated Emma Bovary's personality. However, I continued reading it for one reason, which is to find out if I was a disaster in my estimation or not. And thank God I was wrong because I was calm and had wasted days reading a book that repeated the idea. In addition, I always learn something new when the scenarios I expect in reading a novel or watching a film are wrong.

Main Street, which centers around the character of Carol (the wife of Dr. Will Kennicott) in the first place, and the village in the second place, depicts the complex relationship between a city girl and the village community she is forced to live in.

In fact, the subject occupies my thoughts exactly like Carol, because I live in similar circumstances. I lived a long period of my life in a city, and after the age of twenty, like Carol, I moved to live in a village. And although the details of her life are completely different from the details of my life, it is the same suffering because of the deep identity between the two worlds. I finally discovered, like Carol, that I did not understand the spirit of my urban and rural community as I should, due to the lack of life experience for me as it happened to Carol.

If we come to the name of the novel "Main Street" and translate this title into our culture, I will give the novel the name "The Middle of the Town". The novel does not talk about Main Street or the middle of the town as a living geographical area in a village, but rather it talks about a phenomenon or a group of phenomena that represent the customs and traditions of the geographical area. Therefore, Carol insisted on giving the name Main Street to the way of thinking, speaking, and dealing of the people of Gopher Prairie, and that Main Street moved with her wherever she settled in her short and long trips to the cities during the years of her life.

The beauty of the novel is that it talks about a very long period of Carol's life, and during this period we read about the long and bitter struggles she went through in her attempt to improve the intellectual and cultural level of the townspeople. And that every time she faced a high wall of ignorance, stupidity, and stubbornness. And with the passage of years, she discovered that her way of sowing the seeds of progress in Gopher Prairie was also characterized by ignorance, stupidity, and stubbornness. Therefore, after she passed the age of thirty, she adopted the key point that in order to have an impact on those around her, she must allow herself to deviate from the changes of society, because the impact must be mutual.

This book is one of the books that I consider a mirror of myself. It is silly to say that it helps me understand and bear society or strengthen myself. I have immersed myself in this saying about the impact of books. This novel is just a mirror of my life.