On this day in 1920 Sinclair Lewis's Main Street was published. This was the first of a string of hit novels over the next decade, most of which poked and scolded at the puritan terrors of small town life -- conformity, boosterism, "a range of grotesque vulgarity," says one critic, "which but for him would have left no record." "He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature," says another, "but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature." Bad or not, Main Street was certainly medicine, and Lewis envisioned Middle America reading it "with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth":