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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Sinclair Lewis's 'Main Street' emerges as a quintessential exploration of small-town America in the early 20th century, encapsulating the contradictions and constraints of provincial life through the eyes of its protagonist, Carol Kennicott. Lewis employs a keenly satirical and sometimes melancholic literary style, blending vivid descriptions with incisive dialogue to critique the cultural stagnation that plagues Gopher Prairie, a fictional Midwestern town. The novel is noteworthy for its candid portrayal of gender roles, societal expectations, and the yearning for intellectual and artistic fulfillment, placing it firmly within the context of American Modernism and its dissection of traditional values. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, drew inspiration from his own Midwestern roots and complex relationships with small-town life. Born in Minnesota, Lewis was acutely aware of the struggles and limitations present within such communities, which lent authenticity to his portrayal of Carol's quest against conformity and mediocrity. His critical views on American society were further influenced by his extensive travels and experiences, fueling the themes of social critique found throughout 'Main Street.' 'With its witty and incisive examination of small-town life, 'Main Street' remains an enduring classic that resonates with anyone who has grappled with the tension between individual aspirations and societal expectations. Scholars, students, and general readers alike will find in Lewis's work a profound commentary on the human condition, making it an essential addition to the canon of American literature.' In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Main Street
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young idealist strides into a quiet Midwestern town believing beauty and reason can bloom on its main street, and collides with the stubborn choreography of habit, pride, and communal conformity that tests the limits of vision, courage, and belonging.
Main Street is regarded as a classic because it crystallized an American argument that still echoes: how communities balance the comforts of tradition with the demands of change. Sinclair Lewis brought a sociological sharpness to fiction, mapping the everyday rituals of small-town life with satire that was both amused and alarmed. His portrait of civic boosterism, neighborly scrutiny, and resistant customs did not merely entertain; it challenged national self-images. The novel’s clarity of observation, moral ambiguity, and refusal to romanticize or condemn outright established a modern idiom for social critique, shaping how later readers and writers understood the cultural stakes of ordinary places.
Written by Sinclair Lewis and published in 1920, Main Street emerged in the unsettled years after the First World War, when the United States was negotiating rapid urban growth, shifting gender roles, and new technologies. The novel is set in the fictional Gopher Prairie, modeled on Lewis’s Minnesota background, and follows Carol Milford, a young, educated woman who marries a local physician and relocates to his hometown. Her hope to kindle civic beauty and cultural life becomes the lens through which the novel studies the town’s institutions, habits, and assumptions. Lewis’s purpose was to examine the texture of American small-town existence without adornment or evasion.
At its core, Main Street presents an encounter between aspiration and routine. Carol arrives with plans for libraries, art, conversation, and urban-style improvements, yet the town’s rhythms—storefront commerce, church calendars, social calls, and seasonal rituals—seem to march on as before. Lewis invites readers to observe not only public meetings or social clubs but also the subtleties of speech, gesture, and appraisal that define belonging. The effect is immersive rather than sensational: a panoramic, day-by-day study of how communities uphold standards and how individuals negotiate them. The novel keeps its focus on texture and atmosphere, allowing tension to accumulate within the ordinary.
Lewis blends realism with satirical edge, layering precise details of streets, houses, merchandise, and manners to create a recognizable social ecosystem. He catalogues tone, cliché, and aspiration alongside brickwork and weather, so that language itself becomes a piece of civic architecture. Humor flickers through scenes of meetings and dinners, yet the wit never fully dispels unease. Irony coexists with sympathy; characters are observed closely, seldom reduced to simple types. The style invites readers to judge and question, then to reconsider. The result is a study in perception—how ideals meet resistance, but also how communities, even at their most stubborn, contain variations and possibilities.
Historically, the book stands at a juncture between Progressive Era reforms and the commercialization of modern America. Small towns promoted themselves as wholesome refuges, even as new businesses, automobiles, and mass culture remapped daily life. Main Street scrutinizes boosterism—the confident promise that prosperity equals virtue—without denying the real bonds that hold neighbors together. The setting functions as both a specific place and a symbol of national self-congratulation. By situating its drama within council rooms, parlors, sidewalks, and storefronts, the novel shows how public ideals are tested at the most local level, where compromise, fatigue, and pride define what change looks like in practice.
Upon publication, Main Street became a bestseller and a topic of controversy. Townspeople recognized themselves in its pages, sometimes proudly, sometimes defensively, and debates erupted about fairness, caricature, and loyalty. The novel gave Lewis a national platform, and within a decade he would become the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for the breadth of his work’s critical realism. Main Street’s success helped confirm the public appetite for fiction that interrogates rather than consoles, and it widened the scope of what American popular novels could tackle, making civic life and social habits worthy subjects for sustained, serious, and commercially successful narrative attention.
The book’s influence lies less in direct imitation than in the conversation it compelled. By turning a magnifying glass on community rituals, professional ambition, and the pressures of respectability, Main Street expanded the field for social satire and realist inquiry. Later writers exploring suburban discontent, institutional inertia, or the friction between personal and communal identities could work in a space Lewis helped normalize. The novel also shaped journalistic and critical vocabularies: Main Street came to signify a cultural stance, not just a physical location. Its method—dense observation married to moral inquiry—remains a model for narratives that probe how values circulate through everyday life.
Central to the novel’s power is its characterization. Carol is not a fixed emblem of reform but a shifting consciousness, brave and uncertain by turns, whose ideals run up against fatigue, self-doubt, and compromise. The local physician she marries—practical, respected, and rooted—embodies a competing vision of what counts as useful work and meaningful change. Around them cluster merchants, clergy, club members, and laborers, drawn with enough specificity to suggest private histories. Lewis grants even the most conventional figures moments of insight or warmth, complicating easy judgments. The town becomes a chorus of partial truths, where kindness and conformity, aspiration and self-interest, mingle continually.
Themes radiate from this chorus. The novel interrogates conformity and individuality, the allure of progress and the cost of stability, and the social scripts that govern gender and class. It examines how taste—what one reads, hangs on a wall, or praises at a meeting—becomes a battleground for status and identity. Commerce and civic pride intersect, producing both community projects and defensive postures. Friendship, gossip, and mutual aid coexist with gatekeeping and suspicion. Through these tensions, Main Street asks what kind of change is feasible within ordinary constraints, and what kind of patience, courage, and imagination are required to sustain a life of ideals among neighbors.
Readers encounter not just an argument but a felt world: winter streets and summer porches, crowded suppers and measured sermons, the cadence of storefront talk and the quiet of back rooms. Lewis builds momentum through accumulation rather than melodrama, letting the weight of habit bear on every proposed improvement. The prose can be bright with caricatural energy, then suddenly cool and diagnostic, mirroring the protagonist’s shifting hopes. This mix of comedy and scrutiny keeps the narrative lively without simplifying its subject. The book rewards slow attention, revealing how small gestures—who speaks first, who hesitates—carry the pulse of a community’s values.
Main Street endures because it illuminates a persistent American negotiation: between belonging and self-definition, hometown pride and restless ambition. Its themes continue to resonate wherever civic life collides with personal vision—whether in small towns, suburbs, or new digital commons. Contemporary readers find in it both a mirror and a provocation, recognizing familiar rhetoric and familiar frustrations. The novel’s lasting appeal lies in its fairness and persistence: it neither flatters nor dismisses the local, and it refuses despair about reform. By staging grand debates within ordinary rooms, Lewis leaves us with a question that never ages: how shall we live together, and at what cost.
Synopsis
Main Street follows Carol Milford, an imaginative young woman educated in the Midwest who is employed as a librarian in a city. Restless with urban routine yet inspired by progressive ideas, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott, a genial country physician from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. He proposes a life together in his hometown, promising comfort, usefulness, and community standing. Carol envisions the small town as a canvas for civic beauty and cultural uplift. Accepting the marriage, she resolves to bring modern planning, taste, and social vitality to a place she has not yet seen, confident that energy and goodwill can transform everyday life.
Upon arrival in Gopher Prairie, Carol's first tour of Main Street reveals a compact business strip of wooden storefronts, false fronts, and practical houses, shaped more by commerce and weather than by design. The town's rhythms are steady and familiar to residents, who value reliability over novelty. Carol's expectations collide with the plainness she sees, but she begins by gathering impressions rather than judging aloud. She studies the stores, the public buildings, and the surrounding prairie, forming plans for gardens, facades, and public spaces. Her husband's busy practice introduces her to local families, and she starts to imagine alliances for a program of improvements.
Carol enters the town's social life through clubs and teas, notably the Jolly Seventeen, where local women set styles and opinions. She meets the capable teacher Vida Sherwin, whose energy is practical and focused, and the bookish lawyer Guy Pollock, who shares her love of literature but avoids conflict. Businessmen promote boosterism, while a visiting magnate, Percy Bresnahan, embodies ambitious commercial values. Carol navigates expectations about manners, speech, and dress, sensing both hospitality and boundaries. Encouraged by initial friendliness, she proposes civic and cultural projects: reorganizing the library, forming a dramatic society, and discussing a town beautification plan rooted in cooperation rather than confrontation.
Her proposals face apathy, jokes, and quiet resistance from those who see them as unnecessary or pretentious. Merchants guard profits; churches safeguard moral order; and club leaders prefer familiar programs. Carol encounters Mrs. Bogart's watchful piety and the county politicians' practical calculations. Small victories—a play successfully staged, a few landscaping efforts—are offset by delays, diluted committees, and compromises. Will supports her in a personal way yet advises patience, emphasizing the town's virtues. Carol experiences isolation as she realizes how firmly conventions guide conversation, entertainment, and charity. Despite setbacks, she keeps revising her methods, seeking common ground that might make reforms feel locally owned.
Two figures broaden Carol's view of the town's social edges: Bea Sorenson, a cheerful Scandinavian maid she hires, and Miles Bjornstam, the outspoken 'Red Swede' who challenges local pretenses. Through them, she sees working-class quarters, hears criticisms of status and wealth, and learns about neglected sanitary conditions. She witnesses how class and ethnicity shape social invitations and gossip, and how kindness can be interpreted as defiance. A local illness exposes vulnerabilities in housing and water systems, reinforcing her belief in practical improvements. Supporters and detractors harden their attitudes, and Carol weighs how direct to be when the consequences for others may be personal and immediate.
Carol's domestic life changes with motherhood, bringing new routines and responsibilities alongside her civic interests. Meanwhile, the onset of war intensifies town meetings, parades, committees, and calls for public loyalty. Patriotic fervor amplifies expectations about speech and conduct, narrowing space for dissent and experiment. Will's medical work grows more demanding, and the couple's evenings are often absorbed by duty. Carol tries to align her aesthetic ideals with wartime service, organizing efforts that seem both useful and acceptable. The community unites around causes that are clearly defined, yet everyday tensions persist, as questions about status, fairness, and change continue beneath public ceremonies and slogans.
After the war's peak, Carol renews her search for cultural stimulus within the town's limits. She befriends Erik Valborg, a talented young clerk with artistic ambitions, whose aspirations mirror her desire for richer creativity. Encouraging his studies and taste, she confronts the town's suspicion of difference and the quick spread of rumor. Conversations about art, opportunity, and escape prompt Carol to reconsider what improvement means: personal growth, institutional reform, or departure. A social misunderstanding escalates, and the atmosphere reminds her how small communities can compress private hopes into public narratives. The episode forces a pause, sharpening her sense of costs and possibilities.
Carol seeks perspective beyond Gopher Prairie by taking work in a larger city during a period of national mobilization, where she meets people who share her reforming outlook and encounters professional routines independent of local expectations. The experience clarifies what she values: effective administration, candid debate, and the relief of being one among many. When she reengages with the town, her strategy shifts from sweeping plans to incremental steps, emphasizing schools, reading, and the confidence of younger residents. Her marriage endures through adjustments and unspoken bargains, and she resolves to contribute where she can, accepting delays without surrendering her long-term hopes.
Main Street presents a continuous portrait of small-town American life in the early twentieth century, balancing individual aspiration with communal habit. Following Carol's experiences from idealism to tempered persistence, the book depicts institutions, social codes, and economic interests that shape daily choices. Without endorsing defeat or triumph, the narrative emphasizes gradual change, the dignity of work, and the complexity of belonging. It suggests that reform is a process of listening, compromise, and endurance as much as vision. By tracing events in the order they occur, the novel conveys how environments mold character, and how character, steadily applied, can modestly reshape environments.
Historical Context
Sinclair Lewis sets Main Street in the 1910s Upper Midwest, in the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, modeled closely on his birthplace, Sauk Centre, Minnesota. The story spans the years just before and after World War I, approximately 1912 to 1919–1920, when the United States experienced rapid urbanization, widening suffrage campaigns, and the crest of Progressive Era reform. Gopher Prairie sits amid prairie farms and lakes on rail lines tying it to Minneapolis–St. Paul and the Dakotas. Its economy depends on grain, dairying, and retail trade with surrounding farms. The town’s scale—several thousand residents—reflects the typical county-seat hub of the period.
The place is marked by frame houses, a grid of unpaved or newly paved streets, a courthouse square, churches, fraternal lodges, a hotel, and above all a commercial spine named Main Street. Telephone lines, a depot, a few automobiles alongside horse-drawn wagons, and a newspaper office complete the setting. Social organization centers on merchants, professionals, and booster clubs, with women’s societies supporting church, charity, and culture. Lewis’s portrayal captures how geography, climate, and transportation shaped daily life in small Minnesota towns and how distance from metropolitan centers intensified reliance on local elites for governance, culture, and the definition of civic virtue.
Progressive Era municipal reform (1890s–1920s) forms a crucial historical backdrop. Across the United States, reformers fought political patronage, promoted public health boards, standardized accounting, and experimented with city-manager government. The American Civic Association (founded 1904) and planning commissions pushed for cleaner streets, sewage systems, parks, and playgrounds. In Minnesota, cities like Minneapolis and Duluth modernized waterworks and garbage collection; smaller towns gradually paved business districts and adopted sanitary codes. Main Street reflects this milieu through Carol Kennicott’s campaigns for civic improvement and culture, mirroring Progressive preoccupations with efficient administration, beautification, and public amenities suited to modern commerce and family life.
Town planning ideals—linked to the City Beautiful movement and emblematic plans such as Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909)—filtered into smaller communities via state university extension services and women’s clubs. The Minnesota State Board of Health, established in 1872, disseminated sanitary guidelines that by the 1910s emphasized fly control, safe wells, and milk inspection. Paving of business blocks, installation of street lighting, and tree-planting became badges of civic pride published in booster pamphlets. In Main Street, Carol’s proposals for parks, a decent auditorium, and street improvements echo these national campaigns, while the town’s resistance illustrates the friction between reform blueprints and entrenched local habits and budgets.
Women’s civic organizations were vital conduits for Progressive municipal housekeeping. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (founded 1890) and the Minnesota Federation (1894) sponsored library drives, school hot-lunch programs, pure-food campaigns, and playgrounds. Carnegie philanthropy funded dozens of libraries in Minnesota between 1899 and 1918, embedding reading rooms into county seats. Reformers saw culture as a pathway to public morality and efficiency. Main Street dramatizes this dynamic: Carol’s attempts to leverage women’s societies and a dramatic club into lasting civic uplift meet club conservatism and booster defensiveness, capturing the era’s tension between ambitious middle-class women reformers and male-dominated commercial networks.
The women’s suffrage movement culminated nationally with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, after decades of organizing by groups such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In Minnesota, the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association (founded 1881) mobilized under leaders including Clara Ueland; the state legislature ratified the amendment on September 8, 1919. Wartime service by women in Red Cross drives and factories strengthened claims to citizenship. Although Main Street ends as suffrage arrives, the novel’s protagonist anticipates the amendment’s social effects: Carol’s education, wage-earning past, civic projects, and debates with male elites reflect the expanding yet contested public role of middle-class women.
World War I (1914–1918) reshaped American small-town life after U.S. entry in April 1917. The Selective Service Act (May 1917) registered millions; Liberty Loan campaigns and the Committee on Public Information’s “Four Minute Men” cultivated patriotic conformity. German American communities in Minnesota—numerous since the nineteenth century—faced pressure to anglicize language and public expression. Local Red Cross chapters packed supplies and service flags hung in front windows. In Main Street, the town’s martial pageantry and suspicion of dissenting voices mirror this mobilization culture, showing how war intensified social surveillance and rewarded boosterism while narrowing tolerance for contrarian civic and cultural experiments.
The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety (MCPS), created in April 1917 under Governor J. A. A. Burnquist, wielded sweeping powers during the war to police loyalty, regulate labor, and suppress perceived sedition. It targeted the Nonpartisan League and the Industrial Workers of the World, restricted foreign-language use, and used permit regimes and raids to discipline political life until its dissolution in 1919. The MCPS set a tone of state-sanctioned vigilance that trickled into county seats. Main Street’s atmosphere—where a freethinking laborer is derided as a “Red” and dissent is equated with disloyalty—tracks the lingering aftereffects of this wartime authoritarianism.
The First Red Scare (1919–1920) erupted amid postwar strikes and bomb scares. Nationwide, the Seattle General Strike (February 1919), the Steel Strike (September 1919), and the Boston Police Strike (September 1919) fueled Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids (late 1919–early 1920). Minnesota saw labor conflicts on the Mesabi Iron Range (notably 1916) and scrutiny of farm and labor organizers. Newspapers equated radicalism with foreignness. Main Street registers the social psychology of this period: small-town elites brand outspoken workers as dangerous, while civic clubs insist on harmony, dramatizing how anti-radical panic diminished space for debate and shored up commercial-class authority.
The temperance movement, organized by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874) and the Anti-Saloon League, culminated in national Prohibition through the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified January 16, 1919) and the Volstead Act (October 1919), which took effect January 17, 1920. Many Minnesota towns had already voted dry; churches and clubs framed temperance as civic hygiene. Prohibition recast leisure, policing, and local politics, often fostering bootlegging and moral surveillance. Main Street reflects the moral absolutism temperance encouraged: social life is narrowed to sanctioned clubs and parlors, and characters invoke sobriety as a test of respectability, reinforcing the town’s suspicion of unconventional behavior.
Automobility and the Good Roads movement transformed Midwestern life. Ford’s Model T (introduced 1908) and dealer credit expanded ownership; the Federal Aid Road Act (1916) funded state–federal cooperation. In Minnesota, the 1920 “Babcock Amendment” established a numbered trunk highway system and a state highway department. Paving Main Streets, grading country roads, and building bridges integrated farm markets and county seats. In Main Street, Dr. Will Kennicott’s automobile enables far-flung medical calls, underscores status, and reinforces the town’s commercial reach. Cars also reshape courtship, recreation, and neighborhood patterns, sharpening the contrast between Carol’s longing for urban amenities and the town’s sprawling, utilitarian landscape.
Public health and professional medicine advanced rapidly after the Flexner Report (1910) restructured medical education and the American Medical Association boosted standards. County health officers promoted vaccination, sanitation, and milk inspection; the 1918 influenza pandemic killed hundreds of thousands nationwide and thousands in Minnesota, straining local physicians. Rural hospitals remained scarce, so general practitioners covered vast territories. Main Street grounds these realities in Dr. Kennicott’s practice: he embodies professional authority yet relies on community trust, house calls, and pragmatic treatments. Carol’s push for clean streets, playgrounds, and better facilities reflects the era’s linkage of environment, morality, and disease prevention in municipal policy.
Immigration and nativism shaped Upper Midwestern demographics. Minnesota attracted Scandinavians, Germans, and later Eastern and Southern Europeans; by 1910 foreign-born and first-generation residents formed large shares of many counties. Wartime nationalism and the revived Ku Klux Klan (from 1915) stoked anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, while the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) criminalized dissent. Americanization drives retooled schools and civic rituals. Main Street echoes this hierarchy: Scandinavian and other immigrant laborers appear as outsiders to the Anglo-Protestant commercial elite, and condescension toward “foreign” manners and ideas becomes a mechanism of maintaining status and suppressing dissent in the civic sphere.
Mail-order retail and communications revolutionized consumption. Rural Free Delivery expanded after 1896, and Parcel Post began in 1913, enabling Sears, Roebuck and Company (founded 1892) and Montgomery Ward to ship goods cheaply to farmsteads. Catalog competition undermined small-town merchants’ control over prices and styles, while local newspapers and clubs campaigned to “buy at home.” Credit systems, installment plans, and standardized goods altered expectations of comfort and taste. Main Street stages these tensions in its shopkeepers’ defensiveness and Carol’s urban-influenced aesthetic standards, highlighting the friction between provincial inventory and national mass culture invading even remote county seats.
Agrarian economics and protest politics framed town–country relations. Wartime demand lifted grain prices, but the 1920–1921 farm depression slashed incomes, burdening debtors and dampening retail sales in market towns. The Nonpartisan League, founded in North Dakota in 1915 by A. C. Townley, promoted state grain elevators and mills, spreading into Minnesota and feeding the Farmer–Labor movement that gained strength in the 1920s. Cooperatives proliferated in creameries and marketing. Main Street mirrors these pressures as merchants and professionals defend booster optimism while farmers press for fairer terms, revealing the latent class conflict beneath the town’s rhetoric of harmony and commercial progress.
As social and political critique, the novel exposes how small-town boosterism, sanctified by Progressive rhetoric and wartime loyalty, can harden into oligarchy. Lewis depicts a business–professional bloc that equates civic virtue with conformity, uses clubs and churches to police dissent, and treats public projects as vehicles for self-congratulation rather than equitable service. Gender ideology narrows women’s public agency even as suffrage approaches, with clubs channeling energies into safe philanthropy. By situating these dynamics in a specific Minnesota milieu, the book indicts a national system in which local power brokers claim moral authority while resisting scrutiny, planning, or inclusion that threatens their status.
The narrative also lays bare class stratification and cultural gatekeeping. Retailers and professionals claim to speak for “the community,” yet disdain laborers, immigrants, and nonconformists, aligning with temperance and national-security campaigns to surveil behavior and opinion. The town’s acceptance of paved streets, cars, and patriotic parades contrasts with its suspicion of libraries, theater, and planning that might redistribute status. Main Street thus critiques the political economy of early twentieth-century America: the fusion of commerce, moralism, and state power (from Prohibition to wartime commissions) that enforces homogeneity, marginalizes dissenting citizens, and leaves genuine democratic deliberation starved of institutions and empathy.
Author Biography
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist whose incisive portrayals of middle-class life made him a defining voice of the interwar era. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for socially observant fiction that mixed satire with realism. Lewis scrutinized small-town conformity, business boosterism, professional ethics, and the temptations of power, shaping public discourse about American identity. Major novels such as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, and It Can’t Happen Here combined reportorial detail with caricatural humor, producing portraits that were at once entertaining and unsettling to readers and critics alike.
Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis grew up amid the rituals and hierarchies of a Midwestern small town that later became central to his work. As a young reader he absorbed American and European realists and experimented with writing for school publications. He studied at Yale University in the early 1900s, contributing to student outlets and honing a direct, journalistic prose. After university he held a series of literary jobs in publishing and magazines, observing the tastes of a national audience. These experiences, along with steady freelance work, sharpened his sense of how ambition, respectability, and consumer culture shaped everyday American aspiration.
In the 1910s Lewis produced travel pieces, stories, and novels for popular magazines and trade publishers, gradually developing the satirical approach that defined his mature work. Early novels including Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, and Free Air examined urban opportunity, occupational life, and mobility through ordinary protagonists navigating modern America. While modestly received, these books revealed his ear for colloquial speech, fascination with professional detail, and skepticism toward boosterism. By the decade’s end he had assembled the observational habits and industrious routine that enabled the rapid composition of his major, nationally debated satires in the 1920s.
Main Street appeared in 1920 and became a cultural phenomenon. Its portrait of a reform-minded woman confronting the inertia and conformity of a small Midwestern town sparked heated debate, praised by some as truth-telling and condemned by others as caricature. Babbitt followed in 1922, centered on a prosperous realtor whose complacency embodied the era’s business culture. The word “Babbittry” entered the language as shorthand for middle-class conformity. Critics such as H. L. Mencken recognized Lewis’s blend of documentary detail and satiric exaggeration, while a mass readership embraced the books, securing his position as a leading analyst of American manners and mores.
Arrowsmith (1925) turned to the medical profession, dramatizing scientific ideals and institutional pressures. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which Lewis declined on principle, objecting to the prize’s criteria. Elmer Gantry (1927) examined evangelical revivalism and stirred controversy for its portrayal of religious hypocrisy. Dodsworth (1929) followed an industrialist confronting personal and cultural dislocation through travel. In 1930 Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American so recognized, for the energy of his social observation and the vividness of his characters. The honor confirmed his international stature and gave fresh momentum to an already prolific and widely discussed career.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he remained productive across novels, plays, and lectures. Ann Vickers (1933) considered social reform and professional women’s lives. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) confronted the specter of authoritarianism in the United States and was swiftly adapted for the stage, notably within the Federal Theatre Project. Later works such as Gideon Planish, Cass Timberlane, and Kingsblood Royal extended his examination of institutions, marriage, class, and race; Kingsblood Royal, in particular, addressed racism and identity. Several novels reached wider audiences through film adaptations, while critical opinion grew mixed, with some reviewers finding the satire repetitive and others praising its persistence.
In later years Lewis traveled, lectured, and continued to publish while his health declined. He died in 1951 in Europe. His legacy rests on a corpus that broadened the range of American realist fiction by subjecting everyday institutions—business, medicine, churches, small towns—to relentless scrutiny. The vocabulary of his books, from “Main Street” to “Babbitt,” became cultural shorthand, and It Can’t Happen Here is frequently revisited during periods of political anxiety. Scholars still debate the balance between caricature and empathy in his characterizations, but his influence on social satire and his Nobel recognition ensure an enduring presence in American literary history.
This is America — a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
The town is, in our tale, called “Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.” But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God's Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.
Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths?
Main Street
CHAPTER I
I
On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College[1].
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot[2]; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.
II
Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went “twosing,” and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.
In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive — thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair.
The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. “Psychic,” the girls whispered, and “spiritual.” Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the “gym” in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team.
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.
For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the “crushes” which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static.
Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew — over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine.
She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol.
Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of “What shall we do when we finish college?” Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love — that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living.
But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world — almost entirely for the world's own good — she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the “beastly classroom and grubby children” the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to “guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness.” Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.
At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero.
Then she found a hobby in sociology.
The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.
A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, “These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them.”
“I just love common workmen,” glowed Carol.
“Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!”
“You're right! I apologize!” Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered:
“I know. You get people. Most of these darn co-eds —— Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people.”
“Oh — oh well — you know — sympathy and everything — if you were — say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was too serious. Make him more — more — YOU know — sympathetic!”
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, “Oh, see those poor sheep — millions and millions of them.” She darted on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement — tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.
She sighed, “That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but — I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!”
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, “Have you looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!”
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today. He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, “Now Charles, would it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?” He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River, hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend, plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding waters.
Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and “dressing-up parties” spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures — the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father sings while shaving.
Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the “little ones,” they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha.
Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the same house.
From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk and efficient herself.
IV
In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work.
It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers — the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished scholars.
V
The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations.
The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing “Carmen” and “Madame Butterfly.” Carol was dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with whom she had “always intended to get acquainted,” and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her.
But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart whispered:
“I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life.”
She believed it. “Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!”
“Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you —— ”
His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her independence. She said mournfully, “Would you take care of me?” She touched his hand. It was warm, solid.
“You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle —— ”
“But I want to do something with life.”
“What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?”
It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer:
“Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I — well, if you HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world.”
“I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice spring evening.”
“Yes.”
“And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing —— ”
Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the “Soldiers' Chorus”; and she was protesting, “No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want — everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but dish-washing!”
Two minutes later — two hectic minutes — they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet.
After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him once a week — for one month.
VI
A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario.
She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life.
The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows.
The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning — and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul.
VII
Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, “Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February.” When she was giving out books the principal query was, “Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week.”
She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she was living.
She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room.
During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her — the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.
CHAPTER II
I
It was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable.
This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember.
Mr. Marbury boomed, “Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott[3] — Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie[4]. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!”
As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular, Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people.
“Pleased to meet you,” stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red skin.
He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged her hand free and fluttered, “I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury.” She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a loud, “Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks.” He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host left them, Kennicott awoke:
“Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a girl, still in college maybe.”
“Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now.”
“Huh! You must be frightfully old — prob'ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!”
Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley.
“How do you like your work?” asked the doctor.
“It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things — the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps.”
“Don't you get sick of the city?”
“St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond.”
“I know but —— Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities — took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?”
“No, but I hear it's a very nice town.”
“Nice? Say honestly —— Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an awful lot of towns — one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie. Bresnahan — you know — the famous auto manufacturer — he comes from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!”
“Really?”
(Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?)
“Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there — some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!”
“Is —— Do you like your profession?”
“Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change.”
“I don't mean that way. I mean — it's such an opportunity for sympathy.”
Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, “Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts.”
Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, “What I mean is — I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened.”
“It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he wanted to — if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training, isn't he?”
“Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town.”
“No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that, curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm a fine one to be lecturing you!”
“No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for all these movements and so on that sacrifice —— ”
After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile.
She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over to them and with horrible publicity yammered, “Say, what do you two think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something.”
She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting:
