Down in the Street

There's a whirl of shorthand out there jiving about Wall Street / Main Street, so now's as good a time to get back to the source of the latter part of the equation -- Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920).

I knew I'd been posting for quite a little while when I recently came across one of my own earlier posts on Sinclair Lewis floating around the internet, already touching on his main works ("Exiled on Main Street," 2/7/2007). So let's keep this a brief sequel.

Carol Milford, the main protagonist of Main Street, worked as a librarian in the Twin Cities before (this is from memory, seems about right) marrying Will Kennicutt, a simple doctor kind of guy who moves her to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, itself a rustic simple-minded but cutting place that drives her batty to improve it by bringing in more culture, and so on. She's not exactly Madame Bovary, and the overall take on all American life is more darkly satiric than deeply tragic. Main Street, a bit like Peyton Place only written and taking place decades earlier, takes rural US towns off their mythic pedestals and shows them to be just as fraught as cities, only on a smaller scale.

On Main Street today, there are still plenty of lawyers, doctors, bankers and the like calling many of the local shots (and some of their associates work on Wall Street). And oh yeah, artists and their allies still try to enliven things, too. The more things change . . .

Today's Rune: The Self.