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        Main Street


        setting

        Gopher Prairie, Minnesota

        time

        1910-1919

        language

        English

        region

        North America

        year published

        1920

        page count

        406

        difficulty

        Intermediate

        main characters

        Carrie Kennicott and her doctor husband

        Rip's impressions

        Nothing of great literature here... although it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In fact, it tied with Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. But, like Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, it has not withstood the test of time. Its prose is sometimes clunky and wooden, the dialogue contrived. Tarkington and Lewis were #1 best sellers more times than any other authors, up until mega-authors like Stephen King and Danielle Steel started to take over the top spot on the charts.

        first line

        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.

        last lines

        (spoiler alert)

        literary tidbits

        Sinclair turned down sharing the Pulitzer Prize award because he felt the business of giving out awards had no integrity, that the books chosen were showing some judge's favoritism for unfair reasons. Even if the novel truly earned the award, there were a lot of other books just as good that did not get a mentioned, he felt.