Main Street, published in 1920, was a sensational best seller that made Sinclair Lewis famous and gave Americans a phrase for small-town conformity. Carol Milford, a lively, idealistic college graduate and librarian in St. Paul, marries Will Kennicott, a solid, kind-hearted doctor, and moves with him to his home town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a prairie town of about three thousand people.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) · CatalogSinclair LewisSinclair Lewis (1885-1951) · CatalogAmerican novelist who satirized Main Street and Babbitt and warned of demagoguery in It Can't Happen Here; first U.S. Nobel laureate in literature.Main Street Babbitt It Can't Happen Here
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Sinclair Lewis
· American novelist who satirized Main Street and Babbitt and warned of demagoguery in It Can't Happen Here; first U.S. Nobel laureate in literature
Short biography: Sinclair Lewis in Great Lives
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Babbitt, published in 1922, is Sinclair Lewis's satire of the American businessman, and its title became a common noun for a self-satisfied conformist. George F. Babbitt, forty-six, is a prosperous real-estate broker in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith.
It Can't Happen Here is a political satire set mostly in Fort Beulah, Vermont, and later in a United States transformed by an elected dictatorship. In the Depression year of 1936, Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a folksy demagogue modeled in part on Huey Long and on European fascists, defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination and then wins the presidency on a program of "Fifteen Points" that promise every man a large annual income, crush "enemies," and exalt a mystical American destiny.