When the windshield was closed it became so filmed with rain that Claire fancied she was piloting a drowned car in dim spaces under the sea. When it was open, drops jabbed into her eyes and chilled her cheeks. She was excited and thoroughly miserable. She realized that these Minnesota country roads had no respect for her polite experience on Long Island parkways. She felt like a woman, not like a driver.

MR. AND MRS. SETH APPLEBY were almost old. They called each other "Father" and "Mother." But frequently they were guilty of holding hands, or of cuddling together in corners, and Father was a person of stubborn youthfulness. For something over forty years Mother had been trying to make him stop smoking, yet every time her back was turned he would sneak out his amber cigarette-holder and puff a cheap cigarette, winking at the shocked crochet tidy on the patent rocker. Mother sniffed at him and said that he acted like a young smart Aleck, but he would merely grin in answer and coax her out for...

The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons. He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street, passing ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod, because he had a lonely furnished room for evenings, and for daytime a tedious job that always made his head stuffy.

Carl Ericson was being naughty. Probably no boy in Joralemon was being naughtier that October Saturday afternoon. He had not half finished the wood-piling which was his punishment for having chased the family rooster thirteen times squawking around the chicken-yard, while playing soldiers with Bennie Rusk.

CAPTAIN LEW GOLDEN would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.

Babbitt is largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, it critiques the vacuity of middle-class American life and its pressure toward conformity. An immediate and controversial bestselling novel, Babbitt was influential in the decision to award Lewis the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930.

Main Street is the story of an idealistic young woman's that attempts to reform her small town. It remains one of the essential texts of the American scene. "In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified, Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them." - Lewis Mumford

"This cheerful little road novel, is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Estate." Free Air is one of the first novels about the road trip, a subject that the Beats, would build a cult following around in the mid-20th century. Written by Sinclair Lewis, Free Air was published in 1919, and even got adapted to a movie in 1922. The film starred Tom Douglas as Milt Daggett and Marjorie Seaman as Claire Boltwood.

The day on which the widow Harri and her two children walked into the small, unsuspecting town of New Kotka, Minnesota, was the day on which the town began to lose its peace and quiet. What the natives saw, sympathetically enough, was an attractive little widow with two children to support. What they found out later was that Harri was a kind of female Napoleon, out to conquer the world for herself. "Harri" was originally published serially in Good Housekeeping magazine in 1943.