Main Street is Sinclair Lewis's brilliant satirical novel from 1920. It features the ambitious young Carol Kennicott, a well educated young woman who longs for a life of sophistication - one filled with bohemians and thinkers and artists. When she marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, a fictional Minnesotan backwater town, her plans get derailed. Aha! She'll bring the city to the sticks - changing the townsfolk, whom she finds aloof and slow, into freethinking sophisticates. Lewis expertly portrays the gossipy, backstabbing small townsfolk in this timeless novel. Though it wasn't expected to be super popular, Main Street sold 250,000 copies in its first 6 months, propelling it to bestseller status quickly. It is deemed by critics to be Lewis's most significant novel, along with its 1922 successor Babbitt. In 1921 Main Street was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, but was later rejected (the award would go to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence). In 1930, Lewis became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though Main Street wasn't mentioned - since the Nobel goes to the Author, not the work - it is for this book and a contribution to literature that he won this esteemed award.