Main Street

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. After studying at Yale, where he worked on student publications and briefly left to try odd jobs, he built a career as a professional writer, first as a freelance editor and writer of magazine fiction, then as the author of novels that fused satire with documentary realism. Lewis broke through with Main Street (1920), a best seller that turned the sleepy town of Gopher Prairie into a national symbol for provincial complacency. The novel propelled Lewis from journeyman to celebrity and triggered a wave of debate about the character of small-town America. That debate, and the resentment of local elites, would trail him for decades. He followed with Babbitt (1922), a portrait of George F. Babbitt, a real estate salesman whose life of salesmanship, social clubs, and platitudes exposes the hollowness of middle-class ideals. The very name “Babbitt” entered the American lexicon, with the word babbittry meaning self-satisfied conformity. Arrowsmith (1925) traced the vocation of a medical researcher, exploring the tensions between scientific ideals and commercial pressures. Elmer Gantry (1927) offered a blistering indictment of religious hypocrisy through the rise of a bombastic evangelist.