DURING the first two decades of the 19th century Theodore Dreiser was the greatest single force in the rise of the American novel and by all odds it's most important liberator. Then came Sinclair Lewis, not to rival but to supplement and to popularize. Theodore Dreiser was neither a reformer nor a satirist, and he never wrote a caricature. Sinclair Lewis was a satirist and by implication therefore a reformer and he did not hesitate to advance his thesis with caricature.
The America which had fought against Theodore Dreiser's novels had been opening its eyes through the ten years before MAIN STREET. The reasons were so intricate and often so subtly interacting that they have been only partially disentangled. But the effects of whatever causes were perfectly clear. The certainties were no longer reliable, and the most superstitious churchman of the Bible belt had his awful moments of misgiving when he saw the young generation openly violating his code with apparent impunity (Smith, 1952).
All that was needed was a vigorous writer who knew the cultural poverty of an American small town because he had lived there long enough to understand it thoroughly before he revolted against it. Then allow him to escape to the world centers where the currents of modernity were running fast and high, there let him become emancipated and veneered, and then watch him tear away the veil of pretense which had modestly concealed the tawdriness of life in Gopher Prairie. Sinclair Lewis, fortuitously conjoining with the drift of the time, precipitated a formless American mood into a smash satiric attitude which set the self-conscious country by the ears.
Freud's theories had first come to these shores about the time FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE appeared. No future study of village life could ever be quite the same because of Freud. His shadowy form lies dark across the SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY (1915) which anticipated Sherwood Anderson WINESBURG, OHIO. It was a tremendous success, partly because of the form and partly because of its viewpoint.
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