Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (ink book reader .TXT) ๐
Description
Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which sheโs exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicottโs home town.
Carol, inspired by big-city ideas, soon begins chafing at the seeming quaintness and even backwardness of the townsfolk, and their conservative, self-satisfied way of life. She struggles to try to reform the town in her image, while finding meaning in the seeming cultural desert sheโs found herself in and in her increasingly cold marriage.
Gopher Prairie is a detailed, satirical take on small-town American life, modeled after Sauk Centre, the town in which Lewis himself grew up. The town is fully realized, with generations of inhabitants interacting in a complex web of village society. Its bitingly satirical portrayal made Main Street highly acclaimed by its contemporaties, though many thought the satirical take was perhaps a bit too dark and hopeless. The bookโs celebration and condemnation of small town life make it a candidate for the title of the Great American Novel.
Main Street was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but the decision was overturned by the prizeโs Board of Trustees and awarded instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. When Lewis went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, he declined itโwith the New York Times reporting that he did so because he was still angry at the Pulitzers for being denied the prize for Main Street.
Despite the bookโs snub at the Pulitzers, Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, with Main Street being cited as one of the reasons for his win.
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- Author: Sinclair Lewis
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Trains!
At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond.
The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army.
The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance knowledge as to where the towns would arise.
If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hotbox last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table.
Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer worldโ โtraveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting cousins from Milwaukee.
Gopher Prairie had once been a โdivision-point.โ The roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers.
The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he โtalkedโ to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted.
During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snowplow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie seaโ โthey were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.
To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the boxcars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic.
She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling pastโ โthe Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the firebox splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: โNo. 19. Must be โbout ten minutes late.โ
In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!โ โfaint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bellsโ โUuuuu! Uuuuu!โ โthe world going byโ โUuuuuuu!โ โfainter, more wistful, gone.
Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking.
VIIShe turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board.
Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of lecturers and โentertainersโ to give a week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she saw placards in every shopwindow, and strung on a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded โThe Boland Chautauqua coming!โ and โA solid week of inspiration and enjoyment!โ But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y.M.C.A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class.
She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, โWell, maybe it wonโt be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but itโs a whole lot better than nothing.โ Vida Sherwin added, โThey have some splendid speakers. If the people donโt carry off so much actual information, they do get a
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