Mr. Lewis hates such dulness—­the village virus—­as the saints hate sin.  Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which certain of their elders once waged against the bad.  Only a satiric anger helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the author of Main Street through the laborious compilation of those brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly concerned in his crusade.  The question, of course, arises whether the ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than the equally ancient war upon sin.  Both narrow themselves to doctrinal contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being virtuous or being intelligent is but a half—­or thereabouts—­of existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined.  There are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is enough to make them fit for fiction.  Mr. Lewis must be thought of as sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic Spoon River rather than the later, calmer, loftier.

Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of literature.  Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the 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