Main Street

Carol Milford, a college-educated, progressive, ambitious young woman, is self-sufficient working as a librarian in St. Paul, when she meets a country doctor, Will Kennicott, who convinces her to marry him and move to the rural Minnesota town of Gopher Prairie. She arrives with dreams of beautifying the town, of establishing art and culture, of improving lives and promoting child welfare, but whose spirit is gradually and inexorably crushed by small-town attitudes, ignorance and bigotry.

By : Sinclair Lewis (1885 - 1951)

Introduction



Chapter 01



Chapter 02



Chapter 03



Chapter 04



Chapter 05



Chapter 06



Chapter 07



Chapter 08



Chapter 09



Chapter 10



Chapter 11



Chapter 12



Chapter 13



Chapter 14



Chapter 15



Chapter 16



Chapter 17



Chapter 18



Chapter 19



Chapter 20



Chapter 21



Chapter 22



Chapter 23



Chapter 24



Chapter 25



Chapter 26



Chapter 27



Chapter 28



Chapter 29



Chapter 30



Chapter 31



Chapter 32



Chapter 33



Chapter 34



Chapter 35



Chapter 36



Chapter 37



Chapter 38



Chapter 39


Carol Milford, the daughter of a judge, grew up in Mankato, Minnesota, and became an orphan in her teens. In college, she reads a book on village improvement in a sociology class and begins to dream of redesigning villages and towns. After college, she attends a library school in Chicago and is exposed to many radical ideas and lifestyles. She becomes a librarian in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the state capital, but finds the work unrewarding. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart.

When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a town modeled on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the author's birthplace. Carol immediately sets about her plans to remake Gopher Prairie, but she is filled with disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism.

She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs, distributes literature, and holds a party to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her efforts, she is ineffective and constantly derided by the leading cliques.

She finds some comfort and companionship with a variety of social outsiders in the town, but these companions all fail to live up to her expectations.

After a political meeting of the Nonpartisan League is broken up by local authorities, Carol leaves her husband and moves for a time to Washington, D.C., to become a clerk in a wartime government agency. She eventually returns. Nevertheless, Carol does not feel defeated:

I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith. (Chapter 39)

Comments

Random Post

  • Just So Stories
    09.05.2019 - 0 Comments
    Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard…
  • The Book of the Cat
    29.12.2020 - 0 Comments
    Stories of kittens and cats who have a variety of adventures. This book is aimed at children, but adults…
  • Laws
    23.05.2021 - 0 Comments
    Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue. It is generally agreed that Plato wrote this dialogue as an older…
  • With Christ in the School of Prayer
    04.03.2020 - 0 Comments
    “We have become so accustomed to limit the wonderful love and the large promises of our God, that we cannot…
  • The Awakening
    16.05.2019 - 0 Comments
    The Awakening shocked readers at the turn of the century with its outspoken treatment of sex and suicide.…
  • Paradise Lost
    18.05.2019 - 0 Comments
    Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. The first…
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
    10.11.2018 - 0 Comments
    The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of four crime novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the…
  • The Return of the Native
    16.11.2018 - 0 Comments
    Like all of Hardy's work, The Return of the Native (1878) is passionate and controversial, with themes and…
  • The Diary of a Birthday Doll
    20.01.2021 - 0 Comments
    A doll, given to a young girl for her birthday, goes through adventures and faults to get her new mother to…
  • The Last Egyptian
    29.05.2021 - 0 Comments
    Published anonymously during Baum's lifetime as he did not want his adult adventure stories to detract from…
  • Máu Bùn và những tiếng thì thầm | Chương 7 | Harry Potter Phòng chứa Bí mật | Tập 2
    17.10.2023 - 0 Comments
    "Harry biết ngay lập tức là Malfoy vừa nói một điều hết sức tồi tệ, bởi vì lời nó vừa dứt là dậy lên tức thì…
  • The Story of a Nodding Donkey
    07.02.2021 - 0 Comments
    One of the twelve Make Believe Stories by Laura Lee Hope, The Nodding Donkey is one of the toys made with…
  • Orra
    10.05.2021 - 0 Comments
    Orra, A Tragedy in Five Acts, which comes from that series' third volume, is Joanna Baillie’s haunting…
  • Crossings. A Fairy Play
    20.08.2020 - 0 Comments
    Under the terms of a will, the Wildersham children have to relocate from the family house in the city to…
  • Household Tales
    28.07.2021 - 0 Comments
    The complete Brothers Grimm stories, as translated directly from the German. Some of the stories will be…
  • The Stolen White Elephant
    03.09.2021 - 0 Comments
    The Stolen White Elephant is a short story written by Mark Twain. In this detective story, the Siamese white…