LEWIS, (Harry) Sinclair 1885-1951
(Tom Graham)

PERSONAL:

Born February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, MN; died of paralysis of the heart, January 10, 1951, in Rome, Italy; son of Edwin J. (a physician) and Emma (Kermott) Lewis; married Grace Livingstone Hegger, April 15, 1914 (divorced, 1928); married Dorothy Thompson, May 14, 1928 (divorced, 1943); children: (first marriage) Wells; (second marriage) Michael. Education: Yale University, A.B., 1908.

CAREER:

Helicon Home (Upton Sinclair's socialist community), Englewood, NJ, janitor, 1906-07; Transatlantic Tales, New York, NY, assistant editor, 1907; Daily Courier, Waterloo, IA, reporter, 1908; worked for a charity organization in New York, NY, 1908; secretary to Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke in Carmel, CA, 1909; Evening Bulletin, San Francisco, CA, staff writer, 1909; Associated Press, San Francisco, staff writer, 1909-10; Volta Review, Washington, DC, staff member, 1910; Frederick A. Stokes (publisher), New York, NY, manuscript reader, 1910-12; Adventure, New York, NY, assistant editor, 1912; Publisher's Newspaper Syndicate, New York, NY, editor, 1913-14; George H. Doran (publisher), New York, NY, editorial assistant and advertising manager, 1914-15; full-time writer, 1916-51. Writer-in-residence, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1942. Acted in several plays, including It Can't Happen Here and Angela Is Twenty-Two.

MEMBER:

National Institute of Arts and Letters (vice president, 1944), American Academy of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Pulitzer Prize, 1926, for Arrowsmith (declined); Nobel Prize for Literature, 1930; Litt.D., Yale University, 1936; award from Ebony magazine for promoting racial understanding in Kingsblood Royal.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

(Under pseudonym Tom Graham) Hike and the Airplane (juvenile), Stokes Publishing (New York, NY), 1912.

Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, Harper (New York, NY), 1914, reprinted, Crowell (New York, NY), 1951, published as an e-book, Text at Wiretap, 1997.

The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life, Harper (New York, NY), 1915.

The Job: An American Novel, Harper (New York, NY), 1917, reprinted, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, Harper (New York, NY), 1917.

Free Air, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1919, reprinted, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1993.

Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott (also see below), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1920, reprinted, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 2003.

Babbitt (also see below), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1922, reprinted, Prometheus (Amherst, NY), 2002.

Arrowsmith (also see below), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1925, reprinted, Signet Classic (New York, NY), 1998, published as Martin Arrowsmith, J. Cape (London, England), 1925, reprinted, 1957.

Mantrap, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1926.

Elmer Gantry, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1927, reprinted, New American Library (New York, NY), 1980.

The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1928.

Dodsworth, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1929, reprinted, New American Library (New York, NY), 1972.

Ann Vickers, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1933, reprinted, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

Work of Art, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1934, reprinted, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1962.

It Can't Happen Here (also see below), Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1935, reprinted, New American Library (New York, NY), 1970.

The Prodigal Parents, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1938.

Bethel Merriday, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1940, reprinted, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1965.

Gideon Planish, Random House (New York, NY), 1943, reprinted, Manor Books (New York, NY), 1974.

Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives, Random House (New York, NY), 1945, reprinted, Buccaneer Books (Cutchogue, NY), 1982.

Kingsblood Royal, Random House (New York, NY), 1947, reprinted, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2001.

The God-Seeker, Random House (New York, NY), 1949, reprinted, Manor Books (New York, NY), 1975.

World So Wide, Random House (New York, NY), 1951, reprinted, Manor Books (New York, NY), 1974.

Arrowsmith; Elmer Gantry; Dodsworth, Library of America (New York, NY), 2002.

PLAYS

Hobohemia, first produced in New York, NY, 1919.

(With Lloyd Lewis) Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts (first produced in New York, NY, 1934), Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1935.

(With John C. Moffitt) It Can't Happen Here (based on his novel; first produced in New York, NY, 1936), Dramatists Play Service, 1938.

(With Fay Wray) Angela Is Twenty-Two, first produced in Columbus, OH, 1938.

OTHER

John Dos Passos' "Manhattan Transfer," Harper (New York, NY), 1926, reprinted, Norwood (Norwood, PA), 1977.

Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929, United Feature Syndicate, 1929.

Selected Short Stories, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1935, reprinted as Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis, I. R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1990.

From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930, edited by Harrison Smith, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1952.

The Man from Main Street; A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904-1950, edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane, Random House (New York, NY), 1953.

Moths in the Arc Light [and] The Cat of the Stars, edited by Densaku Midorikawa, Taishukan (Tokyo, Japan), 1960.

Lewis at Zenith; A Three-Novel Omnibus: Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1961.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories, edited by Mark Schorer, Dell (New York, NY), 1962.

(With Dore Schary) Storm in the West (screenplay), Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1963, revised edition, 1981.

To Toby, Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), 1967.

If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1997.

Minnesota Diary, 1942-1946, edited by George Killough, University of Idaho Press (Moscow, ID), 2000.

Also author of The American Fear of Literature, 1931. Author of column, "Book Week," for Newsweek, 1937-38; columnist, Esquire, 1945.

The majority of Lewis's manuscripts are kept at Yale University; another large collection is at the University of Texas at Austin.

ADAPTATIONS:

Samuel Goldwyn filmed Arrowsmith in 1931 and Dodsworth in 1936; Sidney Howard also wrote a play adaptation of Dodsworth produced in New York, NY, 1934; Elmer Gantry was adapted as a 1960 United Artists film starring Burt Lancaster; a sound recording of Lewis's short story, "Young Man Axelbrod," was produced by American Forces Radio and Television Services, 1972; a sound recording was made of Arrowsmith by American Forces Radio and Television Service, 1973; LP recordings of It Can't Happen Here and Babbitt, with text read by Michael Lewis, were produced in 1973 and 1974, respectively.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sinclair Lewis was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Four years before he was awarded this honor in 1930, however, Lewis was also the first author in history to decline the Pulitzer Prize. In a 1926 press statement reprinted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Lewis justified this refusal by explaining his objection to the provision that the Pulitzer be given to the book "which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." The conditions could not be applied, Lewis felt, to an author such as himself who had satirized American lifestyles in such works as Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth; and he objected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and other institutions that upheld the illusion of a perfect America.

In his writings, Lewis regularly attacked the mainstream American populace for its "standardized thinking, aggressive provincialism, and self-righteous tyranny over all those who do not rigidly subscribe" to cultural norms, explained Leo and Miriam Gurko in College English. Because these attitudes were contagious, in Lewis's view, he dubbed such a mindset the "village virus." Using humor through his gift of mimicry, he managed to reveal the problems caused by this uniquely American disease while still appealing to his readers. Thus, commented James Lundquist in his Sinclair Lewis, Lewis "was that most unusual phenomenon, an important writer whose appeal to the masses was genuine." Toward the end of his career, however, it is generally felt that Lewis's writing lost much of its satiric edge. As Sinclair Lewis author Sheldon Norman Grebstein commented, in the novels he published after the 1920s, Lewis became "the historian, not the reformer; … the scribe of what has been, rather than the maker of what should be."

Literary historians usually divide Lewis's writing career into three periods: an apprenticeship phase that includes the novels from Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man to Free Air; the 1920s period during which Lewis wrote what are generally considered his most significant books; and the years that are regarded as a time of decline after the publication of Dodsworth. His early novels, as Grebstein pointed out, are "novels of and about education … [that are] generally characterized by a playful, deliberately facetious approach." Leo and Miriam Gurko also considered this to be a "period of unfocused hesitation" in Lewis's attitude, since some of his novels—Our Mr. Wrenn, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, and Free Air—present a positive view of American provincialism, while The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life and The Job: An American Novel are more denigrating. It was a period of experimentation that also hints at what would characterize Lewis's later work. As Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Martin Light observed, in The Job the author "tries out his imitation of salesman's talk, later to be developed in the speech of Babbitt"; and in The Trail of the Hawk the novelist first addresses the problem of combining "the practical life with the artistic one, … a possibility that would puzzle many of Lewis's later protagonists." These ideas finally came to clarity in Lewis's novel Main Street.

Main Street became Lewis's first popular and critical success. A unique work of fiction, it was praised by a New York Times Book Review writer as a "remarkable book.… A novel, yes, but so unusual as not to fall easily into a class. There is practically no plot, yet the book is absorbing. It is so much like life itself, so extraordinarily real." In this book Lewis set out to paint a picture of American life in the small town, rather than to tell a story. More specifically, as David Aaron reported in The American Novel: From James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, the author wished "to puncture humbug notions about the alleged neighborliness of small towns." To do so, Lewis created the character Carol Kennicott, a young, idealistic woman from the city who moves to the little burg of Gopher Prairie after she marries Will, a simple country doctor. Here, she does not find the charming village that her husband described, but rather a jumble of rundown buildings populated with people whose opinions offer "nothing but gossip, trivial talk, spite, and prejudice," as Light related.

It was Lewis's satirical depiction of Americans as ignorant, hypocritical busy-bodies rather than as neighborly, hard-working people with high values that caused a sensation when Main Street was first published. "People argued either that it was a libel upon the village or that it was a revelation of the truths about American pettiness and hypocrisy," wrote Light. Many critics who held the latter opinion felt that this aspect of the novel is what makes it a significant contribution to American literature. C. E. Bechhofer, for one, wrote in his Literary Renaissance in America that "the essential part of the book is its description of the clash between the culture of the more or less civilized Eastern American cities and the arid self-complacency of the Middle Western small towns.…The importance of Main Street lies in its merciless, sardonic study of Middle Western life." Writing in Smart Set, prominent critic and author H. L. Mencken similarly emphasized Main Street's illustrative power. "It is an attempt, not to solve the American cultural problem, but simply to depict with great care a group of typical Americans. This attempt is extraordinarily successful." Part of the author's success is due to his frequently noted skills at mimicking colloquial language. "Lewis represents [American] speech vividly and accurately," praised Mencken.

While much critical attention has been given to Lewis's depiction of American life in Main Street, Carol Kennicott's story is not without significance. Sometimes compared to the character of Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Carol is plagued with a vague longing for a better, more enriching life. Disgusted by the drabness and lack of culture in Gopher Prairie, she "overcompensates with almost frenzied activity, gives silly but lively parties, and takes up and drops many useless projects," described American Literature critic Stephen S. Conroy. The townspeople, however, do not want their village changed and perceive Carol's actions to be motivated by a snobbish condescension toward them. Sensing their growing hostility and feeling suffocated by the town's inertia, she runs away to Washington, D.C. Carol soon discovers that she cannot find fulfillment in the city, either, and becomes homesick for Gopher Prairie and her husband. She returns home to raise her child, adapting to and learning to love village life. In this way, people like Carol Kennicott are "inoculated with the 'village virus,'" revealed Stanton A. Coblentz in Bookman, and "discover escape to be [as] meaningless as imprisonment, and in the end resign themselves to Gopher Prairie and to 'the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia.'"

Like several other critics, Prairie Schooner reviewer George H. Douglas found that despite the story's "inexplicable charm," Main Street is "a work of weak development and poor characterization." The rambling plot of the novel caused May Sinclair to complain in the New York Times Book Review that "the book lacks a certain concentration and unity." Still, Sinclair joined other reviewers in her opinion that with Babbitt, Lewis's next novel, the author "triumphs precisely where in Main Street he failed. By fixing attention firmly on one superb central figure he has achieved an admirable effect of unity and concentration." "The plain truth is, indeed, that Babbitt is at least twice as good a novel as Main Street," enthused Mencken in another Smart Set review.

Lewis's Babbitt has become such an influential work within the scope of twentieth-century literature that, as Light noted, "the word babbitt [—meaning a person who conforms to prevailing social and moral standards—] has entered common parlance." Babbitt is set in Zenith, Winnemac, a fictional city and state that would later appear in a number of Lewis's other novels. In this urbanized version of Gopher Prairie, the author presents a memorable description of George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent with a passionate desire "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late." According to Mark Schorer in Landmarks of American Writing, by following Babbitt in his daily activities Lewis gives the reader "an almost punctilious analysis of the sociology of American commercial culture and middle-class life." "Indeed," wrote Light, "the triumph of this book is that it brought before us an enduring perception of an American type … [and it] is the book, moreover, in which Lewis was most skillful in his satiric representation of American speech."

"Since the publication of Babbitt," Schorer reflected, "everyone has learned that conformity is the great price that our predominantly commercial culture exacts of American life. But when Babbitt was published, this was its revelation to Americans, and this was likewise how the novel differed from all novels about business that had been published before it." Most such books portrayed larger-than-life tycoons, but Lewis's character is, as Mencken described him, "a sound business man, a faithful Booster, an assiduous Elk, a trustworthy Presbyterian, a good husband, a loving father, a successful and unchallenged fraud." Discontented with his conformity, Babbitt has a brief affair and dabbles in leftist politics to the point that he risks being ostracized by all his friends. His wife's sudden illness toward the end of the novel, however, provides "Babbitt and his clan a pretext for patching up their squabble," said Conroy. Soon, Babbitt is back to his old self, a conformist and member of the Good Citizens' League.

The story of Babbitt's discontentment, rebellion, and reassimilation has caused some critics to compare George Babbitt to Carol Kennicott, who goes through the same process in Main Street. "Freedom is, in fact, the main theme of Lewis' novels," revealed Anthony Channell Hilfer in his Revolt from the Village: 1915-1930, later adding that, as far as the "theme of freedom goes, Babbitt is a mere rewriting of Main Street though far superior in technique." In his analysis of these two works, Hilfer concluded that Lewis's protagonists fail to find their freedom because the "truth is that Lewis simply cannot imagine freedom within the social structure of America." In Men of Destiny author Walter Lippmann offered another explanation. Describing these novels, along with Lewis's Arrowsmith, as "stories of an individual who is trying to reform the world, or to find salvation by escaping it," Lippmann observed that Carol and Babbitt fail because they have no direction in their lives, "no religion available which they can embrace, and therefore, there is no salvation." Martin Arrowsmith, on the other hand, discovers salvation through his reverence for science.

Lewis conceptualized Arrowsmith as a heroic figure, a character who would embody the ideas of purity, hard work, and freedom that the author considered an integral part of the pioneer America whose spirit was being swallowed by the country's urbanization. Although in his earlier books Lewis also lamented the passing of the days of America's pioneers, he had not before focused on a character who could remain faithful to what the author saw as their way of life. Arrowsmith concerns the life of a medical doctor who devotes himself to research in bacteriology. Standing in the way of his search for scientific truths are, as T. K. Whipple cataloged in the New Republic, "the commercialism of the medical school, the quackery which thrives in the country, the politics and fraud of a Department of Public Health in a small city, the more refined commercialism of a metropolitan clinic, and the social and financial temptations of a great institute for research." After a series of struggles against all these overpowering forces, however, Arrowsmith manages to resist temptation by reasserting his faith in science and "finally takes refuge in the wilds of Vermont where he can pursue his researches undisturbed." "The chief importance of Arrowsmith, then," Whipple concluded, "is that it shows the extreme difficulty of pursuing the creative or theoretic life in the United States."

Arrowsmith, like Main Street and Babbitt, was an immense popular and critical success. Critics praised its characterization, unity of point of view, and compelling plot. Arrowsmith, declared Whipple in his Spokesmen: Modern Writers in American Life, "is the final proof of [Lewis's] creative power." The American Academy of Arts and Letters felt that the novel deserved the Pulitzer Prize, but Lewis refused the honor, saying that it was an award given only to those who champion American wholesomeness. He also objected to the Academy's selection procedures and to the possibility that if the prize became too prestigious authors might strive to write less controversial books in order to win it. But Lewis revealed privately in a letter to his publisher and friend Alfred Harcourt—reprinted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series—"that ever since Main Street burglary, I have planned that if they ever did award [the Pulitzer] to me, I would refuse it." Believing that Main Street deserved an award, Lewis "also felt that perhaps Babbitt had been neglected two years later," said Light, and this resentment helped to fuel his decision to reject the Pulitzer. Many American journalists, however, speculated that Lewis was just looking for publicity.

With the publication of Elmer Gantry, the novelist caused an even greater uproar. In penning his satire of religion and the ministry in the United States, many critics thought Lewis had gone too far in lambasting American religious practices. The novel was censured in Boston, denounced by clergymen of all faiths, and enraged several readers enough to threaten Lewis with bodily injury. Lippmann described Elmer Gantry as "the study of a fundamentalist clergyman in the United States, portrayed as utterly evil in order to injure the fundamentalists. The calumny is elaborate and deliberate. Mr. Lewis hates fundamentalists, and in his hatred he describes them as villains. This was, I believe, a most intolerant thing to do." In The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925, author Maxwell Geismar concluded that if "the larger scene of Elmer Gantry presents a cross-section of religious activity in the United States, and if there are some witty descriptions of this activity, there is also remarkably little insight into the more fundamental aspects of religious motivation—either personal or cultural—or into that commercial exploitation of religion which is the ostensible theme of the novel."

If Elmer Gantry seemed like an unfair tract against fundamentalism, Dodsworth "once more assured Lewis' readers that he was a generous man," according to Schorer in his biography of the author. Dodsworth studies American culture by contrasting it with life in Europe as seen during the travels of Sam Dodsworth and his wife, Fran. Portraying Dodsworth as a man possessing the most enviable virtues of middle-class America, Lewis chronicles the final days of his marriage to his shrewish wife and his realization that practical work and art can be combined to form a worthwhile career. Rather than directing any satire toward his main protagonist, the author this time directs his scorn at Fran, who is envious of the European aristocracy's display of wealth and surfeit of leisure time. She has several affairs with shallow, ostentatious male friends until Dodsworth is compelled to ask for a divorce despite his undying love for her. Afterwards, Dodsworth learns from his relationship with Edith Cortright to appreciate the simpler lifestyles Europe has to offer, such as that of the Italian peasants whom Edith admires. At the novel's conclusion, he returns home planning to become an architect of modern, artistically designed houses. Though some critics were more interested in Lewis's switch from satirizing Midwesterners to the simple criticism of Fran's snobbishness, others, like Nation reviewer Carl Van Doren, felt that the author's sympathetic portrayal of Dodsworth is more significant. The "sympathetic insight" and description of Dodsworth's hopeless, foolish love for Fran "gives him a dignity which no other character of Sinclair Lewis has ever had," Van Doren explained.

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and thereby marked a plateau in his career. Although many of his later works after Dodsworth sold well, it is generally maintained that he never again reached the same level of achievement that he had in the 1920s. Orville Prescott, in his In My Opinion: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Novel, attested that Lewis's post-Nobel books are "either pale imitations of his earlier work or venomous outbursts of hatred and melodrama." The command of satiric mimicry that had been praised in the earlier books, Light added, became "almost a parody of itself" during the last years. Even during the 1920s, the author had written critical failures such as Mantrap and The Man Who Knew Coolidge, but he could no longer compensate with books equal to Babbitt or Arrowsmith.

The most notable novels that Lewis wrote during the last two decades of his life include such sensationalistic works as It Can't Happen Here and Kingsblood Royal as well as the novel many critics consider his best during this period, Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives. Published in 1935, It Can't Happen Here describes a possible scenario in which America elects a man who becomes a fascist dictator; and Kingsblood Royal is Lewis's attempt to decry racism by describing its effects on a white man who discovers he has a distant black ancestor. Ebony magazine gave Kingsblood Royal an award in recognition of Lewis's attempt to dispel racial preconceptions, but Prescott wrote that in trying to denounce racists in Kingsblood Royal "Lewis protested much too much," making the characters "unreal and unrepresentative." Similarly, critics such as Commonweal contributor Geoffrey Stone considered It Can't Happen Here to be "poorly characterized and as hastily written as anything" by Lewis.

Prescott also denounced novels like Cass Timberlane and Kingsblood Royal for their completely unsympathetic portrayal of Americans. "The two books were not only inferior as fiction," the critic protested, "they were cruelly unjust caricatures of American life." Nevertheless, Cass Timberlane is often recognized as one of the author's better novels during his later years. As Edward Weeks remarked in the Atlantic, the book shows merit in that "it is written with more affection than his other [later] works"; and Light labeled it "Lewis's most successful effort after the Nobel Prize."

As early as 1935, Granville Hicks observed that Lewis was "losing those virtues" that he had previously displayed. Several literary analysts have hypothesized about the decline in Lewis's writing. "Lewis either ran out of or ran out on ideas about character and personality, and started basing his books on issues of a near-political nature, leaving matters of art for matters more properly the concern of the day's newspapers," suggested Anthony West in the New Yorker. Alfred Kazin offered in his On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature that the novelist's satire lost its power "when … America lost its easy comfortable self-consciousness, [and] Lewis's nervous mimicry merely brushed off against it.… What these later works also signified, however, was not only Lewis's growing carelessness and fatigue, but an irritable formal recognition of his relation to American life." As a number of critics suggested, this recognition by the author marked his own acceptance of the village virus. In an obituary for Lewis, a London Times writer reflected how Lewis, once the rebel and critic of American values, had become respectable: "He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he had derided and denounced. His home town graciously forgave his insults, made him its favorite son.… Sinclair Lewis, Knocker, had turned into Sinclair Lewis, Booster."

Some critics have never considered Lewis to be a major writing talent, even during the peak of his career. In his Spokesmen, for example, Whipple also disparaged Lewis's characterization, and wrote that the author's "interest is in social types and classes rather than in individuals as human beings." This, along with his dependence on mimicry, research, and use of his own personal experience for material mark "a poverty of invention or imagination," according to Whipple. As Nation contributor Joseph Wood Krutch attested, Lewis "rarely if ever escaped the limitations of mimicry as an artistic device." Despite Lewis's limitations, however, critics like Light acknowledged that "he deserves more attention than he now receives."

"Lewis's reputation has rested," Lundquist wrote, "and most likely will continue to rest, on his notoriety as a polemicist—and he was a good one, deserving comparison to H. L. Mencken and perhaps even to Thomas Paine." "Lewis accomplished a great deal in his writing career," reflected Light in his book, The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis. "As America's first Nobel Prize winner in literature, he became for Europe the symbol of America's coming of age. He was a leader on best-seller lists in the United States; … he helped destroy one picture of the small town and substitute another." More recent critics, such as MidAmerica contributor David D. Anderson, regard Lewis as "not a great writer.… But the best of his works, those that have added words to our language, those that give us greater insight into moral shortcomings of our times and ourselves, those that define the victimization of the individual in a world of mass vulgarity, deserve better of us than we have been willing to give."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bechhofer, C. E., The Literary Renaissance in America, William Heinemann (London, England), 1923.

Bode, Carl, editor, The Young Rebel in American Literature, Heinemann (London, England), 1959, pp. 51-76.

Boynton, Percy, More Contemporary Americans, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1927.

Bradbury, Malcolm, and David Palmer, editors, The American Novel and the Nineteen Twenties, Arnold (London, England), 1971, pp. 85-105.

Cabell, James Branch, Some of Us: An Essay in Epitaphs, Robert M. McBride (New York, NY), 1930.

Cohen, Hennig, editor, Landmarks of American Writing, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1969, pp. 315-327.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Cowley, Malcolm, editor, After the Genteel Tradition, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1964, pp. 92-102.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 9: American Novelists, 1910-1945, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Fleming, Robert E., and Esther Fleming, Sinclair Lewis: A Reference Guide, G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1980.

Forster, E. M., Abinger Harvest, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1936.

Frank, Waldo, Salvos: An Informal Book about Books and Plays, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1924.

Geismar, Maxwell, The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1947, pp. 69-150.

Geismar, Maxwell, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1958, pp. 107-118.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, Sinclair Lewis, Twayne (New York, NY), 1962.

Griffin, Robert J., editor, Twentieth Century Interpretations of "Arrowsmith," Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1968.

Hatcher, Harlan, Creating the Modern American Novel, Farrar & Rinehart (New York, NY), 1935.

Hicks, Granville, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1935.

Hilfer, Anthony Channell, The Revolt from the Village: 1915-1930, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1969, pp. 158-192.

Hoffman, Frederick J., The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, Free Press, 1962, pp. 408-415.

Hutchisson, James M., The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 1996.

Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, Reynal & Hitchcock (New York, NY), 1942, pp. 217-226.

Lewis, Grace H., With Love from Gracie: Sinclair Lewis, 1912-1925, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1955.

Light, Martin, editor, Studies in "Babbit," Charles E. Merrill (Columbus, OH), 1971.

Light, Martin, The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, IN), 1975.

Lingeman, Richard, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, Random House (New York, NY), 2002.

Lippmann, Walter, Men of Destiny, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1927.

Lundquist, James, Sinclair Lewis, (New York, NY), 1973.

Mencken, H. L., H. L. Mencken's "Smart Set" Criticism, edited by William H. Nolte, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1968.

Prescott, Orville, In My Opinion: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Novel, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1952.

Priestly, J. B., Literature and Western Man, Harper (New York, NY), 1960.

Rourke, Constance, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1931.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., editor, The Comic Imagination in American Literature, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1973, pp. 247-258.

Schorer, Mark, editor, Society and Self in the Novel, English Institute Essays, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1956, pp. 117-144.

Schorer, Mark, editor, Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1962.

Schorer, Mark, Lewis: An American Life, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1961.

Schorer, Mark, Sinclair Lewis, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1963.

Sheean, Vincent, Dorothy and Red, Houghton Mifflin (New York, NY), 1963.

Sherman, Stuart P., The Significance of Sinclair Lewis, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1922.

Spindler, Michael, American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1983.

Stegner, Wallace, editor, The American Novel: From James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1965, pp. 166-179.

Tuttleton, James W., The Novel of Manners in America, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1972, pp. 141-161.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1981, Volume 13, 1984, Volume 23, 1987, Volume 39, 1991.

Watkins, Floyd C., In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1977.

West, Rebecca, The Strange Necessity, Doubleday, Doran (Garden City, NY), 1928, pp. 295-308.

Whipple, T. K., Spokesmen: Modern Writers and American Life, D. Appleton (Minneapolis, MN), 1928, pp. 208-229.

Woolf, Virginia, The Moment and Other Essays, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1948.

PERIODICALS

American Literature, November, 1970, Stephen S. Conroy, pp. 348-362.

American Mercury, August, 1930.

American Quarterly, December, 1973, pp. 558-577.

American Scholar, spring, 1954, pp. 162-184.

Atlantic, October, 1945; April, 1951, pp. 30-34, November, 1960, pp. 39-48; October, 2002.

Bookman, January, 1921, Stanton A. Coblentz, review of Main Street.

College English, February, 1943; January, 1948, pp. 173-180.

Commonweal, November 22, 1935; November 13, 1936; June 6, 1947.

Gentlemen's Quarterly, November, 1992.

Literature in Transition, number 5, 1962, pp. 1-20.

MidAmerica, Volume 8, 1981.

Modern Fiction Studies, autumn, 1985.

Modern Language Quarterly, December, 1971, pp. 401-408.

Nation, March 12, 1914; November 10, 1920; April 3, 1929; February 24, 1951; May 22, 1972, pp. 661-662.

New Republic, March 24, 1917; December 1, 1920; April 15, 1925, T. K. Whipple, review of Arrowsmith.

New Yorker, April 7, 1928; May 24, 1947; April 28, 1951; May 17, 1993.

New York Herald Tribune Books, March 8, 1925.

New York Review of Books, October 8, 1992.

New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1920, review of Main Street; May 29, 1921 (interview); September 24, 1922; October 1, 1961; May 10, 1987.

New York Times Magazine, February 5, 1950 (interview).

North Dakota Quarterly, number 40, 1972, pp. 7-14.

Outlook, May 2, 1914.

Prairie Schooner, winter, 1970, George H. Douglas, pp. 338-348.

Public Health Reports, July-August, 2001, Howard Mark, "Reflections on Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith: The Great American Novel of Public Health and Medicine," p. 371.

Renascence, winter, 1966.

Saturday Review of Literature, August 1, 1925.

Scribner's Magazine, July, 1930.

Smart Set, January, 1921; October, 1922.

Southwest Review, autumn, 1947, pp. 403-413.

Yale Review, winter, 1987.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Time, January 22, 1951.*