“Main Street” is the moving picture of a small American town and the portrait of a representative individual. Gopher Prairie is the typical American settlement as there are hundreds of them in the United States, east and west. Yet the difference in longitude has its importance. As I have already pointed out, it is in the Middle West that one has a chance to study the purest forms of American life to-day. That is due to isolation and to the absence of aristocratic or unassimilated foreign elements. It is there that Lewis studied his typical Americans. Gopher Prairie is a little burg of about three thousand souls, not a very large field for observation. Carol, the heroine, belongs to a good family. She has been well brought up. She holds a University degree and marries a doctor. Kennicott is an average man and a good soul. He is neither very refined nor very cultured, but he is a kind and reliable man, courteous, clean and disinterested. He is strongly marked psychologically by what Freud calls the “mother complex.” He has besides, like most Americans, a morbid sense of sociability and an unqualified respect for public opinion. In Kennicott the novelist has shown well the conflict of individual initiative with the tyranny of accepted standards. Individual initiative in the book is personified by his wife, Carol, a semi-pathetic character but one whom Lewis was careful enough not to turn into a Hedda Gabler. Her main virtue is zeal and her pet defect restlessness. She is pretty, even a bit coquettish within the bounds of respectability, a “womanly woman” rather than a feminist. She knows several languages, art and literature, and is not satisfied with all that. Like most American women she would like to reform society and make the world better, let the world will it or not. Of course, Gopher Prairie opposes her plans and refuses to be reformed. Carol is bitterly disappointed, and so are we. She means so well, she is so eager and sincere! And yet, when we think it over, we come pretty near to agreeing with Sinclair Lewis that Carol overdoes it, and that a reformed Gopher Prairie, with three thousand reformers in petticoats, would hardly do to keep the place fit to live in. Lewis is certainly not for the commonplace Gopherprairians. Is he more decidedly for Carol? This is difficult to say, because he made her half a Joan of Arc and half a Tartarin in skirts.