[ccowie]

I'd like to nominate Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. It's one I've wanted to read for several years, but never seemed to get around to. It was published in 1920 so it should make it just under the wire.

This from Indigo:
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.

This from Goodreads:
Main Street, the story of an idealistic young woman's attempts to reform her small town, brought Lewis immediate acclaim when it was published in 1920. It remains one of the essential texts of the American scene. Lewis Mumford observed: "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 [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. 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."