Just imagine the beauty of the services as held in a local church with Slovenian hymns accompanied by violinists, until they could afford an organ. These same immigrants sought beauty and richness in their lives, building churches that rivalled European cathedrals and enriching their lives with village bands and community festivals.

Immigrants saw education as the ticket to a better life and one of the reasons they valued it was because it often had not been available to them in the old country. Pioneer settlements saw school as one of the first things to begin, first in a settler's home and then in a frame or log school. Everyone else is a recent immigrant with a heavy accent without any interest in education or cultural enrichment.īut in my research for my books on local churches and communities, I have found just the opposite to be true. In Lewis' town, there's a handful of people with Anglo-Saxon roots at the top of society who are the doctors and lawyers and bankers with money and status.

While some critics have seen 'Main Street' as a realistic portrayal of small town life in the early 1900s, I have from my first reading of the book in college found his depiction of the residents of Gopher Prairie to be caricatures and his analysis of its social structure to be faulty. The exhibit, put on by the Minnesota Historical Society, opened April 10 and will run through the rest of this year. This book and the 22 others Sinclair Lewis wrote are featured in the exhibit 'Sinclair Lewis: 100 Years of Main Street' at the Minnesota History Center in St. In this she fails, miserably and repeatedly, until she finally concedes that her life, although not what she had envisioned, wasn't so bad after all. This was perhaps a point the author was making, but it gets lost in his protagonist trying to change the stolid, conventional Gopher Prairie residents.

Sinclair lewis mainstreet