populace.
The reception of _Main Street_ is a memorable episode in literary
history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other
thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other
thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the
expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that
thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that
complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on.

_Zona Gale_

Before _Main Street_ Sinclair Lewis, though the author of such promising
novels as _Our Mr. Wrenn_ and _The Job_, had been forced by the neglect
of his more serious work to earn a living with the smarter set among
American novelists, writing bright, colloquial, amusing chatter for
popular magazines. If it seems a notable achievement for a temper like
Mr. Masters's to have helped pave the way to popularity for Mr. Lewis,
it seems yet more notable to have performed a similar service for Zona
Gale, who for something like a decade before _Spoon River Anthology_ had
had a comfortable standing among the sweeter set. She was the inventor
of Friendship Village, one of the sweetest of all the villages from Miss
Mitford and Mrs. Gaskell down. Friendship lay ostensibly in the Middle
West, but it actually stood--if one may be pardoned an appropriate
metaphor--upon the confectionery shelf of the fiction shop, preserved in
a thick syrup and set up where a tender light could strike across it at
all hours. In story after story Miss Gale varied the same device: that
of showing how childlike children are, how sisterly are sisters, how
brotherly are brothers, how motherly are mothers, how fatherly are
fathers, how grandmotherly and grandfatherly are grandmothers and
grandfathers, and how loverly are all true lovers of whatever age, sex,
color, or condition. But beneath the human kindness which had permitted
Miss Gale to fall into this technique lay the sinews of a very subtle
intelligence; and she needed only the encouragement of a changing public
taste to be able to escape from her sugary preoccupations. Though the
action of _Miss Lulu Bett_ takes place in a different village, called
Warbleton, it might as well have been in Friendship--in Friendship seen
during a mood when its creator had grown weary of the eternal
saccharine. Now and then, she realized, some spirit even in Friendship
must come to hate all those idyllic posturings; now and t