Main Street

A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

Reform-cycle architecture—Carol's arrival, repeated campaigns, flight to Washington, return without victory—plots satirical recurrence rather than triumph, so plot scores 85.

Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!"

Carol the educated idealist, Will Kennicott the decent complacent doctor, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Bea Sorenson, and Juanita Haydock render Gopher Prairie as ensemble without mere caricature, so cast scores 88.

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.

Thirty-nine chapters of club meetings, house calls, and civic debates assume patience; the Washington interlude and return compress the final movement at satirical tempo, so pace scores 80.

Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs.

Lewis's sharp, journalistic irony—"the eternal aching comedy of expectant youth," "a bomb to blow up smugness"—alternates catalogue with aphorism more surgically than Dreiser, so prose scores 87.

Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people.

Gopher Prairie as Everytown—Main Street, the Thanatopsis Club, the Jolly Seventeen, Howland & Gould's grocery—maps provincial geography as moral argument, so world scores 91.

A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.

Ch.I—Carol on the hill, walnut fudge and Brieux, the breeze bellying her skirt—immediately establishes the gap between aspiration and destination, so hook scores 90.

that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."

Small-town satire as national diagnosis—not local color but structural critique—names the conformity machine before the reader has vocabulary for it, so innov scores 93.

I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow.

Carol's defiant credo answered by Will's storm-windows—neither victory nor surrender, marriage persisting while ideals survive as private religion—honest but less devastating than the middle satire, so ending scores 86.