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"Main Street Begins in Minnesota!" A Minnesota Map Published at the Height of Sinclair Lewis Fever.
Cute vintage pictorial map of Minnesota, issued by the Northern Pacific Line in part to promote tourist travel from Minnesota to Yellowstone National Park.
The map includes cartoon vignettes around the state. There are also short descriptions for the state's main regions and cities: Minneapolis, St. Paul, "No. 1 Butter State", Duluth-Superior, Arrowhead Vacationland, Iron Range, and International Falls.
There is an inset map of the total length of the Northern Pacific in the lower right corner labeled "Main St. of the Northwest".
At the town of Sauk Center is a note "Sinclair Lewis 'Main Street' here". Despite the novel's uncharitable depiction of small-town Minnesota, it made a major cultural impact on the state (especially in the 1920s and '30s) and is still celebrated in the town, Sauk Center (Gopher Prairie in the book), that it derided. Main Street was a key impetus for Lewis's 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature, and this map was clearly published when Lewis-mania was wrong strong in the state-there are no fewer than three references to "Main Street" on the map.
