Sauk Centre, The Original Main Street

Sauk Centre, Minnesota, gave America its most famous small town without meaning to. Sinclair Lewis was born here on February seventh, eighteen eighty-five, and grew up in this prairie community of a few thousand people on the edge of the Minnesota lakes. He left as soon as he could, went to Yale, and traveled widely.

But in nineteen twenty he published Main Street, a novel that used Sauk Centre, thinly disguised as Gopher Prairie, to dissect the conformity, gossip, and quiet cruelty of small-town American life. The book was a sensation and a scandal. Sauk Centre residents were not entirely pleased to be the model.

Ten years later, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The town eventually came around. Today his boyhood home is a museum, and the town calls itself The Original Main Street.

The place he fled made him famous, and the fame brought the town a kind of immortality he could not have intended.