Audiobook · read by volunteers
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)
Read by Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Mark Nelson, RedToby, Anthony Craine, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Jesse Owen, Robert Beach, Silver, Barbara Pfaff, J. M. Smallheer · 40 chapters · 18 h 24
About the book
Carol Milford is young, educated and full of ideas about how to make the world more beautiful. When she marries a country doctor and moves to his hometown, Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she expects to bring culture and change to a place that needs them. What she finds instead is a town that is smug, suspicious of new ideas and proud of its narrowness. Sinclair Lewis writes with humour, anger and an uncanny ear for the way people talk, and his portrait of small-town America caused a sensation when it appeared in 1920. It is both a love story and a social satire, and its questions about conformity and ambition still feel current. Lewis would later become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ten voices share the reading of this long, absorbing novel of over eighteen hours.
Introduction
Sinclair Lewis, who lived from 1885 to 1951, published Main Street in 1920. Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town not unlike the one he portrays, he saw it become the book that made him one of the most talked-about American authors of his time. The novel centres on Carol Milford, a liberal, free-spirited young woman reared in the metropolis of Minneapolis. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor who is a small-town boy at heart, and when they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.
Carol is appalled at the backwardness of Gopher Prairie. Her disdain for the town’s physical ugliness and smug conservatism sets her at odds with its inhabitants, and she tries to change them through clubs, theatricals and reform schemes. The story follows her efforts and the resistance she meets, as well as the quiet adjustments of her marriage. Lewis draws the townspeople with a satirist’s eye, but he also gives them their dignity.
The novel was a bestseller and a source of controversy, since many readers either recognised their own towns in it or resented the picture. It is often discussed as a landmark in the American realist tradition and an important step on the way to Lewis’s later recognition as a Nobel laureate in literature. Its dialogue, in particular, is full of life.
The recording is made up of 40 chapters and lasts about eighteen and a half hours. It is shared among ten LibriVox volunteers. For listeners who enjoy social comedy, long novels and a sharp portrait of a way of life, it is a rewarding and surprisingly modern book.
Public domain
Sinclair Lewis died in 1951: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text