“WE WANT OUR UTOPIA NOW—AND WE'RE GOING TO TRY OUR HANDS AT IT”

LEWIS, Sinclair. Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Octavo, original blue cloth. $500.

First trade edition, second printing, of Lewis’s breakthrough novel of small-town America.

With the 1920 publication of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis, then a journalist and apprentice novelist, became an overnight success. In Main Street, wrote E.M. Forster, Lewis has managed to "lodge a piece of a continent in our imagination," and biographer March Schorer noted that "without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature." Lewis later won and refused the Pulitzer Prize and became the first American novelist to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. First edition, second state, with battered type: page number "54" on page 53 and "may" on the final line of page 387. Without scarce dust jacket. Bruccoli & Clark, 212.

Interior generally quite nice, only slight foxing and soiling to original cloth, light wear to extremities. An extremely good copy.