Sinclair Lewis's Main Street: A Reverse Portrait to the American Myth

Abstract

The American novelist, Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota on the seventh of February in 1885. He was the third son of a country physician, Edwin J. Lewis, and had two brothers, Fred (born in 1875) and Claude(born in 1878). His mother, Emma Kermott Lewis died in 1891. His father, a year later, remarried another woman named Isabel Warner whom he considered to be his own mother. His boyhood life was full of problems. He suffered from loneliness in his provincial small Midwestern town which he yearned to escape. After preschool at Oberlin Academy, he entered Yale University in 1903. Yet he didn't get the bachelor's degree until 1908. He dropped out for a year during which he traveled to Panama and worked as a janitor at Upton Sinclair's social colony, Helicon Hall. After graduation from Yale, he began his writing career, working for newspapers and publishing houses and at times selling plots to Jack London. Yet the numerous stories and the five novels he published between 1910 and 1920 were dismissed by critics as insignificant. It was with the publication of Main Street in 1920 that he achieved real fame. It was his instrument of social change: he satirizes the devastating and stultifying picture of the middle-class American life in the 1920s of his hometown, Sauk Centre by creating a town called Gopher Prairie. Lewis, like his father, married twice. His first marriage to Grace Livingstone Hegger, whom he met while working in New York City, on the fifteenth of April in 1914, failed. In 1928, he married another woman, the journalist Dorothy Thompson and in 1930 their son, Michael was born. However, their marriage also failed twelve years later. After the breakup of his second marriage, he spent his life in Europe. He was often seen, after 1939, with the young actress, Macella Powers who eventually left him, marrying another man. In 1950, he left Europe and died of advanced alcoholism in 1951 at the age of sixty seven. The paper shows the reverse portrait of the American myth that Lewis, draws in his novel, Main Street. It explains the concept of the American myth briefly and makes clear how Lewis employs it in presenting a reverse picture by using his pungent criticism. It points to the environmental and psychological sides that urge Lewis to draw such a picture which his heroine, Carol Kennicott the reformer, tries hard to change but is met with failure. Her failure leads her to stay in the provincial Gopher Prairie and confirm to its life style.