Satire and Sentiment: Sinclair Lewis and the Middle Class

Abstract

Few writers can have staked a claim for the national representativeness of their fiction so boldly, so arrogantly even, as did Sinclair Lewis in his short preface to Main Street (1920). ‘This is America’, he begins sweepingly, and claims that Gopher Prairie’s Main Street is ‘the continuation of Main Streets everywhere’. And in the novel he attributes to his protagonist, Carol Kennicott, a representativeness that is both regional — as ‘the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest’ — and broadly social — as ‘commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting’. Main Street sold 180000 copies in the first six months of 1921 and its phenomenal success, making it ‘the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history’, seemed to justify Lewis’s boldness and to indicate that he had deeply plumbed the national mood.¹