The two-sided moral coin – the buffalo nickel, the wheat penny – has been in circulation for a long time; duplicity is the currency of the region that volunteers as America's Main Street. “Main Street,” in fact, was the title Sinclair Lewis chose for his breakthrough novel, a sour-toned study of small-town parochialism and hypocrisy set in his native Minnesota. The action takes place primarily in the fictional Gopher Prairie, although the heroine, Carol Milford, hails from Mankato, the real-life town where Tim and Gwen Walz taught high school. Curious and independent, with a zeal for social betterment, Carol is hampered by the conformity and complacency of Gopher Prairie, where she moves after marrying a local doctor.
Her fate struck a chord with the reading public and also caused some controversy. At least one small-town library banned “Main Street” from its shelves, and the Pulitzer board, overruling its own jury, denied Lewis the prize. But the book was the best-selling novel of 1921. Almost as popular was Lewis's sequel, “Babbitt,” a literary sensation whose main character's name entered the language as a synonym for provincial boosterism.
In 1930, Lewis became the first American – North or South – to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his “ability to create new kinds of characters with wit and humor.” It's fair to say that his work pokes fun at ordinary Americans, but it also expresses the self-critical, self-satirizing spirit that has always been a hallmark of American literature.
Perhaps especially the literature of the Midwest. In the selection of American Nobel Prize winners, the region is a dominant and versatile presence. TS Eliot, born in St. Louis, may or may not count, as he embraced British citizenship. But Ernest Hemingway, a kid from Oak Park, Illinois, certainly does, despite all the years in Paris and Cuba. That includes the powerful Chicagoan Saul Bellow, who had the audacity to be born in Quebec. And that, of course, includes Toni Morrison, whose imagination was rooted in the soil of Ohio, and Minnesota's own Bob Dylan.
The very central location of this part of America has made it a crossroads and a patchwork, a landing and transit point for migrants from east to west, from south to north, from rural to urban. Swedes, Germans and Irish in the mid-19th century; Jewish and non-Jewish Eastern Europeans thereafter; African Americans and Appalachians between and after the World Wars; fighters from Haiti, Somalia and Central America in the present.
