Main street

Résumé : "'Main Street' is being vaselined by the newspaper[s]...and pawed by the women's clubs, not because it happens to be a very competent piece of writing, but simply and solely because it presents an extremely acidulous picture of human existence in a small American town, and thus caresses the vanity of all those who are able to thank God that they do not live in such a town, and are not as Dr. Lewis' folk are....Here, of course, I do not sniff at Herr von Lewis' achievement. On the contrary, I seize the opportunity to say again, as I said a good while back, that 'Main Street' is a very excellent piece of work, boldly imagined and often brilliantly executed....Books as good as 'Main Street' should be admired on a plane above mere prejudices...the cockney should not be so ready to laugh at the poor yokel: he is quite as thumping an ass himself." - Baltimore Sun, 01/03/1921 "It is not just MAIN STREET'S heroine, who longs to get out of Gopher Prairie; it is the reader as well. And yet this novel, with all its vacillations and ambiguities of artistic purpose, has a reach of greatness to it, a sense of human softness and helpless witness. The popular success of the book derived, my suspicion is..., from the identification of many female readers with the heroine." - New Yorker,