age is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no
village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that.
Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and
towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against
them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than
those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter
and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I _know_.... I have lived a long time,
and my real problems have always been simple."

_Sinclair Lewis_

_Spoon River Anthology_ was a collection of poems, _Winesburg, Ohio_ was
a collection of short stories, _The Anthology of Another Town_ was a
collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form,
Sinclair Lewis's _Main Street_, to bring to hundreds of thousands the
protest against the village which these books brought to thousands.

Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the
narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the
complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful.
Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in
both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding
closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of
death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher
Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has
photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a
tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of
his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No
other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail
in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here
and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against
his village--and indeed against all villages--is that of being dull. "It
is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful
of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as
the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is
slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God."

Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses
this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the
march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the
individual colors and g