Sinclair Lewis

Main Street & Babbitt

by Sinclair Lewis

In ARROWSMITH, Martin Arrowsmith fulfills a lifelong dream of becoming a physician with a passion for research. Combatting the forces of ignorance and greed, he relentlessly pursues scientific truth, even in the face of his own personal tragedy. ARROWSMITH (1925) was Sinclair Lewis's most praised novel and won him the Pulitzer Prize, which he refused. In ELMER GANTRY, Sinclair Lewis's satire of fundamentalist religion, the hero is not unlike today's corrupt and greedy TV evangelists. A charlatan and womanizer, Gantry begins as a Baptist, and rises to become the head of a Methodist church. Lewis's novel, which scandalized the churchgoing public when it was published in 1927, reveals the hypocrisy he found in organized religion. DODSWORTH tells the tale of Sam Dodsworth, a prosperous car manufacturer, who retires and travels to Europe with his shallow, affected wife, Fran. Their marriage is in trouble, and Fran tires of Sam's earnest American naiveté and takes up with an aristocrat much younger than she. When the man's snobbish mother forbids her son's marriage to such a woman, Fran begs Dodsworth to return to her. He, however, having seen her real nature and found a woman more appreciative of his good qualities, divorces Fran and lives permanently in Europe with his new wife.

Editions of Sinclair Lewis

	ISBN 9781931082082	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Penguin Group USA	Date 2002	Price $12.00	G+/NONE
	ISBN 9780940450615	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Penguin Group USA	Date 1992	Price $11.95	Near Fine

Publisher Notes

In Main Street and Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to reveal as no writer had done before the complacency and conformity of middle-class life in America. These remarkable novels combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late". Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph, was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. Lewis's idealistic, imaginative heroine, Carol Kennicott, longs "to get (her) hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful", but when her doctor husband brings her to Gopher Prairie, she finds that the romance of the American frontier has dwindled to the drab reality of the American Middle West. Carol first struggles against and then flees the social tyrannies and cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie, only to submit at last to the conventions of village life. The great romantic satire of its decade, Main Street is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her community. "I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America", wrote H. L. Mencken when Babbitt appeared in 1922. "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen. Every American city swarms with his brothers. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite". In the character of George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real estate man from Zenith, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature - the total conformist. Babbitt is a "joiner", whothinks and feels with the crowd. Lewis surrounds him with a gallery of familiar American types - small businessmen, Rotarians, Elks, boosters, supporters of evangelical Christianity. In bitingly satirical scenes of club lunches, after-dinner speeches, trade association conventions, fishing trips, and Sunday School committees, Lewis reproduces the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, largely for his achievement in Babbitt. These early novels not only define a crucial period in American history - from America's "coming of age" just before World War I to the dizzying boom of the twenties - they also continue to astonish us with essential truths about the country we live in today.

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