Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Brooke Allen (Introduction, Notes); 1920/2008. Softcover. (Barnes & Noble Classic) (CO)

"This is America-a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.” So Sinclair Lewis prefaces his novel Main Street. Carol is a relatively worldly and educated woman, and when she marries a doctor and follows him to his hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she hopes to put the things she has learned into practice and contribute to the improvement of her new community. But the locals are far from welcoming,

Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self-satisfied inhabitants of small-town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty.

Author-winner of Nobel Prize in Literature