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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
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Title: Main Street
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Release Date: April 12, 2006 [EBook #543]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN STREET ***
Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger
MAIN STREET
By Sinclair Lewis
To James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer
Contents
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This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little
groves.
The town is, in our tale, called "Gopher Prairie, Minnesota." But its Main Street is the continuation
of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or
Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton
Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer
says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of
the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing
and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is
the envy of the four counties which constitute God's Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud
Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.
Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who
should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not
be other faiths?
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CHAPTER I
I
ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief
against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the
blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and
portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon
walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry
instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so
graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower
road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned
back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous,
plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant
youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are
deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the
American Middlewest.
II
Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still
combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in
Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them
from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one
lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at
Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted
her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a
graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of
the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.
In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally
in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores
recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive—
thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair.
The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer
negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had
supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls
whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather
vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young
women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge
bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies'
Basket-Ball Team.
Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of
the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying
powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous.
For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's
acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she
yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she
did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static.
Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent
for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but
always she effervesced anew—over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries,
over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine.
She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin
took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched
to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol.
Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career.
Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we
do when we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended
to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work
hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-
flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's
estate. She was not in love—that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living.
But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world—almost entirely for the world's own
good—she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these
there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly
classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes
bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their
feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed
insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do
harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar.
At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture
scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero.
Then she found a hobby in sociology.
The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from
Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University
Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through
the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at
the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of
staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her
forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof.
A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty
black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others
in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-
lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them."
"I just love common workmen," glowed Carol.
"Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!"
"You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of
abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red
fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands
behind him, and he stammered:
"I know. You get people. Most of these darn co-eds——Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people."
"Oh—oh well—you know—sympathy and everything—if you were—say you were a lawyer's wife.
You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I
get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was
too serious. Make him more—more—YOU know—sympathetic!"
His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the
steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep—millions and millions of them."
She darted on.
Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among
celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without
the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of
grateful poor.
The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement—tree-planting,
town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England,
Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her
finger-tips as delicately as a cat.
She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs
crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was
the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of
girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or
pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only
trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students.
It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement.
But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it
before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.
She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and
make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but—I won't be that
kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island?
Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build
libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a
quaint Main Street!"
Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary
teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher because his opponents had to answer
his questions, while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you looked
that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!"
The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today. He begged of sporting young
Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of
that malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?"
He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the
date of Magna Charta.
Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered town hall. She had found
one man in the prairie village who did not appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but
she had assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him.
III
Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie villages. Her father, the
smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all
her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-
sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn. Mankato lies between
cliffs and the Minnesota River, hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties
with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before hell-for-leather posses.
As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its fables about the wide land of

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