Although every chapter does not necessarily incorporate each of these features, there are ample suggestions to encourage reading and to enhance understanding. Organized by chapters, it provides questions, historical notes and allusions, vocabulary study, quotations, and assorted activities. “While Reading the Novel” guides students during their reading. The pre-reading activities involve and engage students, preparing them to read this mature work. This guide contains four sections: Before Reading the Novel, While Reading the Novel, After Reading the Novel, and a Bibliography. Because of the mature nature of the novel’s themes as well as its parallels to the struggles of early 20th-century America, Main Street is recommended for students of American Literature in senior high school or college.
Adolescents can relate to the idea of being outsiders and should enjoy responding to changes in the main character.
Main Street also deals with the struggles in developing a new relationship – whether private as in a marriage or public as with society – and the compromises necessary to adapt an individual personality to make the relationship successful. The novel examines the homogenizing influence of small town life, how it kills cultural diversity, and how hunger for money prevents its residents from pursuing insider interests. According to town lore Charles Corrigan, the mortician, commented, "Well, Lewis got away from this town after all." As he opened the urn, a gust of wind sent the ashes flying. Claude Lewis decided to use Lewis’s funeral urn as a memorial rather than bury it in the ground. Lewis, however, never really came to terms with the town of his youth. Sinclair Lewis became persona non grata in Sauk Centre for many years, but gradually, the town forgave him, and he remains a cottage industry. In nearby Alexandria it was banned the Sauk Centre Herald kept editorial silence for five months before noting in its edition of March 13, 1921: "A perusal of the book makes it possible for one to picture in his mind's eyes local characters having been injected bodily into the story." Claffey writes: Main Street at first evoked wrath in this town and its environs. In his article from the Boston Globe, “Dropping by Main Street 60 Years Later,” Charles E.
The novel is set in Gopher Prairie, roughly based on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s hometown. In the first six months of 1921, it sold 180,000 copies. Lewis felt it would sell 10,000 copies, and his publisher predicted a run of 20,000 would be adequate. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, published in 1920, was not expected to be a commercial success.
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