For the residents of real-life Gopher Prairie (the fictional setting of Lewis’ blockbuster breakthrough, “Main Street”), mortality and America’s diminishing interest in literature lent them the ultimate hand. Though its would-be demolishers cite a desire to move it, not to make it extinct, it does seem to resonate with a melancholic note of poetic justice in the hometown of the writer who overturned the myth of small-town virtue and harmony, and in doing so, shone a light on a dark section of the American dream.

Just a stone’s throw off the highway, the Center occupies land that has been coveted in more recent years for higher purposes its proximity to travelers seems more desirable as a McDonald’s perhaps, or even a Motel 6. (Ironically, the young Sinclair Lewis did take a break from undergraduate studies at Yale to work at Upton Sinclair’s cooperative-living Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, New Jersey.)įor more than thirty years, I’ve passed a sign on the interstate en route to my family’s lake cabin in western Minnesota that reads “Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center” and, for a minute as we whisked by each year, felt an itch of interest that finally needed a scratch last summer. When I mentioned plans to visit Lewis’ hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota to a couple acquaintances, acquaintances who review books mind you, I got responses like, “I tried to read ‘The Jungle’ and never really got into it.” Though some Chicago bias toward the unrelated Upton Sinclair is understandable, this kind of confusion rarely plagues the likes of Lewis’ contemporaries, including most of those named above, as well as Fitzgerald and Dreiser. Buck the odd woman out)-last names only needed-Sinclair Lewis is an American literary giant whose posthumous posture becomes more and more diminutive with time.

America’s first Nobel Prize winner in literature, one of a esteemed oligopoly of letters that includes Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, O’Neill and Bellow (Pearl S.

Sinclair lewis mainstreet