Main Street

Carol Milford, a lively young librarian full of plans to bring beauty and ideas to the world, marries Will Kennicott, a kind, practical country doctor, and moves to his small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Its main street, with its ugly shops, gossip and smug contentment, horrifies her, and her efforts to improve the town, through a drama club, new houses or simply different opinions, meet with polite resistance and ridicule.

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) grew up in just such a town, and the novel's satire of small-town America made it a sensation in 1920. A decade later he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Compare the very different view of the Midwest in My Ántonia.