44- ] American Literature - Sinclair Lewis

44- ] American Literature 

Sinclair Lewis

1885–1951 

Sinclair Lewis, in full Harry Sinclair Lewis, (born Feb. 7, 1885, Sauk Centre, Minn., U.S.—died Jan. 10, 1951, near Rome, Italy), American novelist and social critic who punctured American complacency with his broadly drawn, widely popular satirical novels. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first given to an American. He became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).

His works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period. Lewis is respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."

Sinclair Lewis, 1914.

Lewis graduated from Yale University (1907) and was for a time a reporter and also worked as an editor for several publishers. His first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), attracted favourable criticism but few readers. At the same time he was writing with ever-increasing success for such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan, but he never lost sight of his ambition to become a serious novelist. He undertook the writing of Main Street as a major effort, assuming that it would not bring him the ready rewards of magazine fiction. Yet its publication in 1920 made his literary reputation. Main Street is seen through the eyes of Carol Kennicott, an Eastern girl married to a Midwestern doctor who settles in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (modeled on Lewis’ hometown of Sauk Centre). The power of the book derives from Lewis’ careful rendering of local speech, customs, and social amenities. The satire is double-edged—directed against both the townspeople and the superficial intellectualism that despises them. In the years following its publication, Main Street became not just a novel but the textbook on American provincialism.

In 1922 Lewis published Babbitt, a study of the complacent American whose individuality has been sucked out of him by Rotary clubs, business ideals, and general conformity. The name Babbitt passed into general usage to represent the optimistic, self-congratulatory, middle-aged businessman whose horizons were bounded by his village limits.

He followed this success with Arrowsmith (1925), a satiric study of the medical profession, with emphasis on the frustration of fine scientific ideals. His next important book, Elmer Gantry (1927), was an attack on the ignorant, gross, and predatory leaders who had crept into the Protestant church. Dodsworth (1929), concerning the experiences of a retired big businessman and his wife on a European tour, offered Lewis a chance to contrast American and European values and the very different temperaments of the man and his wife.

Lewis’ later books were not up to the standards of his work in the 1920s. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) dramatized the possibilities of a Fascist takeover of the United States. It was produced as a play by the Federal Theatre with 21 companies in 1936. Kingsblood Royal (1947) is a novel of race relations.

In his final years Lewis lived much of the time abroad. His reputation declined steadily after 1930. His two marriages (the second was to the political columnist Dorothy Thompson) ended in divorce, and he drank excessively.

Career

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, writing fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. In the summer of 1908, Lewis worked as an editorial writer at a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa. He came to the Carmel-by-the-Sea writers' colony in September 1908, to work for the MacGowan sisters and to meet poet George Sterling in person. He stayed with roommate and friend, writer William Rose Benét at photographer Arnold Genthe's house that was close to the beach. Lewis and Benét left Carmel after six months. Lewis came to San Francisco where Sterling helped him get a job at the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Lewis would return to Carmel in the spring of 1910 and meet Jack London. That year he sold two story plots to London.

While working for newspapers and publishing houses he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Legacy

Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis's reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars throughout the 20th century.[40] Despite his enormous popularity during the 1920s, by the 21st century most of his works had been eclipsed in prominence by other writers with less commercial success during the same time period, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Since the 2010s there has been renewed interest in Lewis's work, in particular his 1935 dystopian satire It Can't Happen Here. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election, It Can't Happen Here surged to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling books. Scholars have found parallels in his novels to the COVID-19 crisis, and to the rise of Donald Trump.

He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series.

Works

Novels

1912: Hike and the Aeroplane (juvenile, as Tom Graham) , 1914: Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man , 1915: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life , 1917: The Job , 1917: The Innocents: A Story for Lovers , 1919: Free Air , Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, June 7, June 14 and 21, 1919 , 1920: Main Street , 1922: Babbitt , Excerpted in Hearst's International, October 1922 , 1925: Arrowsmith , 1926: Mantrap , Serialized in Collier's, February 20, March 20 and April 24, 1926 , 1927: Elmer Gantry , 1928: The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen

1929: Dodsworth , 1933: Ann Vickers , Serialized in Redbook, August, November and December 1932 , 1934: Work of Art , 1935: It Can't Happen Here , 1938: The Prodigal Parents , 1940: Bethel Merriday , 1943: Gideon Planish , 1945: Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives , Appeared in Cosmopolitan, July 1945. , 1947: Kingsblood Royal , 1949: The God-Seeker

1951: World So Wide (posthumous) , Babbitt, Mantrap and Cass Timberlane were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.

The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949)

Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press. The first attempt to collect all of Lewis's short stories.

Volume 1 (June 1904 – January 1916)

Volume 2 (August 1916 – October 1917)

Volume 3 (January 1918 – February 1919)

Volume 4 (February 1919 – May 1921)

Volume 5 (August 1923 – April 1931)

Volume 6 (June 1931 – March 1941)

Volume 7 (September 1941 – May 1949)

Articles

1915: "Nature, Inc.", The Saturday Evening Post, October 2, 1915

1917: "For the Zelda Bunch", McClure's, October 1917

1918: "Spiritualist Vaudeville", Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Gasoline Gypsies", The Saturday Evening Post, December 20, 1919

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Want a Lift?", The Saturday Evening Post, December 27, 1919

1920: "Adventures in Autobumming: The Great American Frying Pan", The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1920

Plays

1919: Hobohemia , 1934: Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts (with Lloyd Lewis) , 1936: It Can't Happen Here (with John C. Moffitt) , 1938: Angela Is Twenty-Two (with Fay Wray) , Adapted for the feature film This Is the Life (1944)

Screenplay

1943: Storm In the West (with Dore Schary – unproduced)

Poems

1907: "The Ultra-Modern", The Smart Set, July 1907 , 1907: "Dim Hours of Dusk", The Smart Set, August 1907 , 1907: "Disillusion", The Smart Set, December 1907 , 1909: "Summer in Winter", People's Magazine, February 1909 , 1912: "A Canticle of Great Lovers", Ainslee's Magazine, July 1912

Forewords , 1942: Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait (by Paxton Hibben; publisher: The Press of the Readers Club, NY NY) , Books 1915: Tennis As I Play It (ghostwritten for Maurice McLoughlin) , 1926: John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer , 1929: Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929 , 1935: Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis , 1952: From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930 (edited by Alfred Harcourt and Oliver Harrison) , 1953: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950 (edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville Cane) , 1962: I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories (edited by Mark Schorer) , 1962: Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (edited by Mark Schorer) , 1985: Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis (edited by John J. Koblas and Dave Page) , 1997: If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Anthony Di Renzo) , 2000: Minnesota Diary, 1942–46 (edited by George Killough) , 2005: Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (edited by Sally E. Parry)

2005: The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Sally E. Parry)