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Customer Review: Excellent and Well Told Story
Carol is a girl with big dreams. When she marries Kennicott, she moves from the Twin Cities where she has supported herself, to rural life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where it is her dream to transform the sleepy town into something better. The ups and downs of Carrie Kennicott's life were felt by each member of our Family Book Club. Just when it seems things can't get any worse for Carrie, they can -- but sometimes they get better. This book has been subject to a lot of literary criticism. Surely, the story can be studied in many ways at many levels. However, one does not need to have a master's in English in order to get a lot of enjoyment out of Main Street. Set in the 1920s, Carrie's story -- her feelings, the changes she tries to make to Gopher Prairie, and all of the people she meets there -- could easily be told today with only minor changes. And, although this book is overall rather depressing in nature, there were quite a few places that it had me laughing out loud. Main Street really captures the aura of small town America, especially middle Minnesota. The real life Gopher Prairie is Sauk Centre, Minnesota. It's an interesting place to visit, as the main street there has now been renamed Sinclair Lewis Boulevard.
Customer Review: It may sound good...
The other review is nice and all, but if you value your time, you will not waste it on this dreadful book. Sure, it sounds like it has some significance. It does not, however, posses a plot that makes you actually want to read. This is the book that you'll be crying over, because you've gotten to the 200th page with 200 more to go, and nothing interesting has happened at all yet to grasp your attention as a reader. Needless to say, most of the sales of this book go toward naive students (such as myself) who have no idea what they are getting themselves into. Please, it you ever want to to enjoy reading again (or get a decent grade on that paper you've been assigned,) do not attempt to read this book. You will find yourself abstaining from most forms of literature following the completion of Main Street.
*EDIT* - For students who plan to just read this book and find information about it for your research papers (character analysis, etc) of the internet/databases, don't bother. Choose a more "main-stream" book, or even a new author (you can only go up from Lewis). Unless you can be (somewhat) original and figure out on your own what the book (character, whatever) is about, then you're SOL. I'm not surprised that articles pertaining to this book are scarce - it is a horrible book. Why would ANYONE want to write about a horrible book?
Product Description
Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. “This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.” So Sinclair Lewis—recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer—prefaces his novel Main Street. 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.
Brooke Allen holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She is a book critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, and The New Leader. A collection of her essays, Twentieth Century Attitudes, will be published in 2003.
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