The book is a corrective to previous novels that depicted rural American life as an honorable struggle among kindhearted folk, expunging colonial slaughter, forced labor, casual violence, and lamentable opportunities for women. First published in 1920 and a runaway best seller, Lewis’s novel may have single-handedly, and radically, transformed American perceptions of life outside cities. Conversely, the small town-every bildungsroman reveals-is a dungeon, where the potential for personal development goes unfulfilled.Īnd of all the books to change this perception, of all the books that extolled cities and deplored small towns, one shines out: Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

Nonetheless, the city represents openness, with adolescents growing into adulthood among a multitude of interactions. Most fail spectacularly: Candide reaches Lisbon only to see it crumble in a giant earthquake, Jo March travels to New York with bold dreams of independence but is recalled home to care for her dying sister, and Holden Caulfield pictures Manhattan as his fresh start only to sulk around collecting romantic misadventures. Literary protagonists quickly mature when released into frenetic urban spaces where their moxie is tested.

One answer is found in literature: cities have always played a central role in the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. How exactly did Americans begin distrusting small towns? How did American small towns stop being great? In the past, it’s true, Americans did believe that their small towns were superior indeed, the Jeffersonian tradition of democracy-built on the backs of yeoman farmers-regarded tight-knit, rural communities as the building blocks of American society. Donald Trump promised to make the heartland great again, but with America’s small towns eroded by the disappearance of small farms, as well as by social problems like opiate addiction, suicide, and endemic poverty, that campaign pledge has been hard to keep. Today, small towns are ridiculed as cultural and economic backwaters, where the Walmart parking lot is the agora.

Sinclair lewis mainstreet