Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, 451 pages

This is America, a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. So Sinclair Lewis, recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer, prefaces his novel Main Street. Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self-satisfied inhabitants of small-town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty.