Dec 28, 2009

Main Street | Themes

Prairie Life
To some extent, the attitudes that prevail in the book’s fictional setting, Gopher Prairie, are a result of the town’s geological circumstances. As Lewis makes clear, the towns scattered across the North American Great Plains plateau were set off in virtual isolation from the rest of the world before the twentieth century. At the time when the novel takes place, from 1912 to 1920, automobiles were unreliable, with thin, smooth tires that offered little traction in wet or snowy conditions and simple engines that gave out frequently even under normal...