1 Sept 1919 Jahr - Main Street by SInclair Lewis

Beschreibung:

By 1929, ninety-three U.S. cities had populations of more than 100,000. New York City exceeded 7 million inhabitants; Los Angeles’s population had exploded to 1.2 million. The 1920 census marked the first time there were more urban than rural Americans, a major threshold for the nation. The lives and beliefs of urban Americans often differed dramatically from those in small towns and farming areas. One sharp critic, the writer Sinclair Lewis, wrote three satirical novels — Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Elmer Gantry (1927) — that mocked small-town life for its religiosity and, as Lewis saw it, hypocrisy and lack of sophistication.

In a decade of friction between traditional and modern worldviews, the urban-rural split that fascinated Lewis represented one line of conflict among several. Many of the fault lines had been in the making for decades, in some cases even centuries. Protestant versus Catholic and Jewish, religious versus secular, native born versus immigrant, and white versus black — but the cultural battles of the 1920s galvanized them into a debate over values, beliefs, and even which people could be deemed “American.”

Zugefügt zum Band der Zeit:

Datum: