Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, — Lewis, Sinclair. Minnesota Diary, — Edited by George Killough. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, Lingeman, Richard.
Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, Lingeman, Richard R. Sinclair Lewis: America's Angry Man. Toggle navigation. Later novels and the Nobel Prize Lewis's next popular novel, Arrowsmith , returned to the form of Main Street to portray a young doctor's battle to maintain his dignity in a petty, dishonest world.
Final years Lewis spent his last years traveling throughout Europe, unable to find publishers for his work and aware that his impact on American literature was far less than his early admirers had led him to believe.
User Contributions:. Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Name:. E-mail: Show my email publicly. From that New York position till the time five years later when I was selling enough short stories to the magazines to be able to live by free-lancing, I had a series of typical white-collar, unromantic, office literary jobs with two publishing houses, a magazine Adventure , and a newspaper syndicate, reading manuscripts, writing book advertising, writing catalogues, writing uninspired book reviews — all the carpentry and plumbing of the city of letters.
Nor did my first five novels rouse the slightest whispers: Our Mr. I lacked sense enough to see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue writing. Main Street , published late in , was my first novel to rouse the embattled peasantry and, as I have already hinted, it had really a success of scandal.
One of the most treasured American myths had been that all American villages were peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that myth.
Some hundreds of thousands read the book with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth.
The next novel, yet unnamed, will concern idealism in America through three generations, from till an idealism which the outlanders who call Americans «dollar-chasers» do not understand. My first marriage, to Grace Hegger, in New York, in , had been dissolved. During these years of novelwriting since , I have lived a quite unromantic and unstirring life.
That, however, would be a typical error of biography. The fact is that my foreign travelling has been a quite uninspired recreation, a flight from reality. My real travelling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States, with their friendliness to strangers and their rough teasing, their passion for material advancement and their shy idealism, their interest in all the world and their boastful provincialism — the intricate complexities which an American novelist is privileged to portray.
Centering a story in a midwestern town was not what sets Lewis apart from writers who came before him; it was the manner in which he portrayed those towns.
The sights, sounds, and people were all given names and identities, but none are exclusive to the plains of Minnesota. Main Street opens with this passage that shows exactly what Lewis was known for in his writing. It emphasizes the universality of his characters and settings:. This is America — a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.
Main Street is the climax of civilization. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral.
Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths? Though Main Street is not a humorous book by any standards, it is written with an entirely satirical edge.
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