Main Street Reading Main Street

Abstract

Abstract Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was a “literary sensation,” garnering both critical acclaim and phenomenal sales (Bucco 13). Published with relatively little fanfare in October 1920, by a year later it had sold 295,000 copies (Lingeman 157). Main Street was not only the best-selling novel in the United States for 1921; it continued to be so for the following four years (Hart 525). And people who did not buy books were also jumping on the Main Street bandwagon: According to the Bookman, it was the book requested most in public libraries across the United States from February through December 1921 and remained in the top five for requests for months after.1 The book had both legs and buzz: In May 1921, Catherine Beach Ely, a reviewer for the New York Times, claimed she was “the last inhabitant” (she does not say of what) to read “the season’s wonderwork.” In the same issue of the Times, one publishing executive bemoaned the fact that “there are actually thirty-seven neo–Main Streets getting into type at present” (Lowry), one of which, Dorothy Canfield’s The Brimming Cup, also published by Harcourt and touted as an “answer” to Main Street, became the second-best-selling novel of 1921. Lewis’s novel spawned parodies such as Carolyn Wells’s Ptomaine Street, and the phrase “Main Street” became almost immediately a shorthand derogatory term for small town U.S.A.