The lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, reflects the position in which America's turn-of-the-century "emancipated woman" found herself.

Published in 1920, Main Street was Sinclair Lewis' first really successful novel. An allegory of exile and return, Main Street attacks the complacency and ingrown mores of those who resist change, who are under the illusion that they have chosen their tradition.

Maxwell Geismar lauded this work as "a remarkable diary of the middle-class mind in America".