Recommendations
Books Like Main Street
Best books to read after Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street is the great American novel of small-town provincial conformity — Carol Kennicott trying to bring culture to Gopher Prairie, finding the town's complacency immovable. These recommendations share its portrait of the educated woman constrained by a provincial world, its satirical engagement with Midwestern America, or its place in Lewis's own decade of satires.
- 1
Buy on AmazonBabbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
The companion — George Babbitt in Zenith City, the male booster's version of the same conformist culture Carol Kennicott found suffocating, Lewis's tighter and more famous novel.
- 2
Buy on AmazonArrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis
The idealist in the same decade — Martin Arrowsmith navigating medical institutions, the Lewis portrait of someone trying to maintain integrity against systemic pressure.
- 3
Buy on AmazonWinesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
The predecessor — the grotesques of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson's 1919 portrait of small-town lives that Lewis was building on and partly reacting against in Main Street.
- 4
Buy on AmazonMy Ántonia
by Willa Cather
The prairie novel as elegy — Jim Burden and Ántonia in Nebraska, the counter-tradition to Main Street in the same Midwestern landscape, memory and beauty rather than satire.
- 5
Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch — the great predecessor to Carol Kennicott, the educated woman constrained by a provincial world's expectations, the English classic Lewis was consciously adapting.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Edna Pontellier's rebellion against social constraint — the earlier American novel of a woman suffocated by her social world, the most directly feminist predecessor to Carol Kennicott.
- 7
Buy on AmazonFlaubert's Parrot
by Julian Barnes
Emma Bovary is Carol Kennicott's French predecessor — the provincial woman who reads too much and expects too much from life, the novel Flaubert wrote that Lewis was inheriting.
- 8
Buy on AmazonMadame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The founding text of the provincial woman's disillusionment — Emma Bovary in Yonville is the literary ancestor of Carol Kennicott in Gopher Prairie, the novel Lewis had in mind.
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