Main Street (1920) - Sinclair Lewis

Written by Sinclair Lewis
Read by Brian Emerson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

· Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
· Release date: 02-10-05
· Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The first of Sinclair Lewis’s great successes, Main Street shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism.
When Carol Milford, a young, liberated woman from St. Paul, Minnesota, marries small-town doctor Will Kennicott, she suddenly finds herself transplanted to Gopher Prairie. Horrified by her new home, an ugly backwater community, she decides it’s time the town made a few changes.

The lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, reflects the position in which America’s turn-of-the-century “emancipated woman” found herself. The story of an idealistic young woman’s frustrated attempts to change the set ways of her small town, Main Street has been hailed as one of the essential literary satires of the American scene.

Lewis’s portrayal of a marriage torn by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small-town America make Main Street a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century American literature. Sinclair Lewis’ cutting portrait of the small-minded inhabitants of small-town America is rich with sociological insight that still resonates today.

AudioFile..
“Sinclair Lewis was the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize. MAIN STREET is his first important book, a closely observed, elegantly written satire of small-town life at the onset of the Jazz Age. At once an artifact and a modern classic, its characters’ slang and civic amenities are exotic–their social and personal concerns wholly familiar. Brian Emerson has a pleasant voice; excellent diction; a bright amiable pace; and the stamina to sustain him through 18 hours of narrative. He delivers the text adequately but without distinction, subtext, or nuance. “

Why not “historical fiction”? It is to us but to Sinclair Lewis it was “contemporary”, it can be called both…..