Sinclair Lewis's Main Street: A Reverse Portrait to the American Myth شارع سنكلير لويس الرئيسي: صورة عكسية للأسطورة الأمريكية

Abstract

              The American novelist, Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota on the seventh of February in 1885. He was the third son of a country physician, Edwin J. Lewis, and had two brothers, Fred (born in 1875) and Claude(born in 1878). His mother, Emma Kermott Lewis died in 1891. His father, a year later, remarried another woman named Isabel Warner whom he considered to be his own mother. His boyhood life was full of problems. He suffered from loneliness in his provincial small Midwestern town which he yearned to escape.                                                                                       

           After preschool at Oberlin Academy, he entered Yale University in 1903. Yet he didn't get the bachelor's degree until 1908. He dropped out for a year during which he traveled to Panama and worked as a janitor at Upton Sinclair's social colony, Helicon Hall. After graduation from Yale, he began his writing career, working for newspapers and publishing houses and at times selling plots to Jack London. Yet the numerous stories and the five novels he published between 1910 and 1920 were dismissed by critics as insignificant. It was with the publication of Main Street in 1920 that he achieved real fame. It was his instrument of social change: he satirizes the devastating and stultifying picture of the middle-class American life in the 1920s of his hometown, Sauk Centre by creating a town called Gopher Prairie.