Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [237]
3 (p. 215) the Little Theaters: The Little Theaters were amateur or semi-professional theater groups with an artistic rather than a commercial agenda. The Little Theater movement was strong in the early part of the twentieth century through the 1930s; it familiarized the public with many of the period’s great playwrights, including Anton Chekhov, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O‘Casey, Eugene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde, and Clifford Odets. Some of the most influential of these theaters were the Moscow Art Theater, the Abbey Theatre and the Irish National Theater, the Washington Square Players in New York, the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts, and the Theater Guild in New York.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
THE NATION
“Main Street” would add to the power and distinction of the contemporary literature of any country. [Sinclair Lewis] must not again forget the responsibility which his talent involves, nor his own sure knowledge that our literature and our civilization need just such books as this. —November 10, 1920
THE NEW YORK TIMES
A remarkable book is this latest by Sinclair Lewis. A novel, yes, but so unusual as not to fall easily into a class. There is practically no plot, yet the book is absorbing. It is so much like life itself, so extraordinarily real. These people are actual folk, and there was never better dialogue written than their revealing talk. The book might have been cut without harm, possibly, for there is an infinite amount of detail, yet this very detail has its power, exerts its magic. The latter half is the more forcefully, clearly written, moves more soundly. In fact, one cannot shake off the impression that this book was begun long ago, when Mr. Lewis was but recently out of college, laid aside, and taken up lately, to be rewritten and reconstructed and finished. There is the sharp reaction of youth to so much of it, a personal note in the hatred Carol has for the people, the ways, the thoughts and the place of Gopher Prairie, a reaction and a note that savor of the agony, undimmed by intervening years, of a sensitive young creature coming from the free outlook and tolerant sympathies of a broader environment into such a prison atmosphere as that of this small Minnesota town. This impression that the book is partly by a college boy and partly by a man with many contacts with life and the world will not down; there are some poorly written pages, some jejune bits that add to it. Yet one would not wish to eliminate this youthful stand in the book. It belongs there.
—November 14, 1920
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Distinctly a “pagan book” is the dictum pronounced against Lewis’s story of small-town life in Gopher Prairie, for which he received such widespread recognition. “Main Street,” according to Bishop [Charles H.] Brent, has caused a good deal of foreboding among the older men of the country. A redeeming feature of the book, said the Bishop, is that “even in the pagan town painted by its author a tiny thread of the religion started by our forefathers still lives.” ...
The materialistic trend of modern literature, as contrasted with the idealistic character of the great literature of the ages at the apex of which he placed the Bible, was scored by the Bishop. While no book ever written contained more unpleasant facts about the ways of men and the world than the Bible, said the speaker, yet through it runs a vein of hope, a turning toward a goal. He found in the tale of Gopher Prairie and other similar writings, on the contrary, “little more than sodden depression.