Books by Sinclair Lewis

The story of a woman whose life mirrors the history of America in the first third of the 20th century.

The Pulitzer Prize winning "Arrowsmith" (an award Lewis refused to accept) recounts the story of a doctor who is forced to give up his trade for reasons ranging from public ignorance to the publicity-mindedness of a great foundation, and becomes an isolated seeker of scientific truth. Introduction by E.L. Doctorow.

Sinclair Lewis's seventh novel, the first written after the breakout success of MAIN STREET, is a scathing satirical critique of capitalism, conformity, and "boosterism" in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. The novel's protagonist, George F. Babbitt, is a middle-aged boss at a real estate agency who excels at selling overpriced houses of poor quality. Obsessed with status, and seeking to rise in the city's tight-knit class system, Babbitt desperately strives to join the right groups, express the best opinions, and know the finest people--but he hopelessly bungles his attempt to climb the social ladder. Suffering an emotional crisis, he briefly rebels and embraces more liberal viewpoints, but the social structure quickly reins him in, forcing Babbitt to realign himself once again with the cultural mainstream. Babbitt is pathetic, pompous, and frequently detestable, but in his earnest, awkward struggles, Lewis sympathetically portrays the tragedy of an individual squashed by the strictures of a banal society.

Cass Timberlane, a middle-aged once-divorced judge in a small town falls in love with a witness in his court: a poor young girl named Jinny. Though his conservative peers try to dissuade him, Timberlane's old dreams of love and romance have been reawakened and the two marry. However, Jinny finds herself stifled by the social conventions and niceties of Timberlane's social world, and she flees with a young lawyer to New York. Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis's novel provides a bleak prognosis on the prospects of love and marriage. The novel was made into a 1947 film starring Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner.

When Sam Dodsworth, a prosperous car manufacturer, retires and travels to Europe with his shallow, affected wife, Fran, their marriage is in trouble. 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.

A vulgar and licentious college football captain becomes a messenger of God as a suave evangelist preacher, in this classic story that is universally recognized as a landmark in American literature. Reissue.

This cheerful little road novel, published in 1919, is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Eastern ways for the homey values of the frontier.

Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis tackled familiar themes of ambition and moral vacuousness in his 18th novel, the story of a golden-tongued professor of rhetoric who joins a variety of money-raising organizations and pointless civic groups in his vague dream of one day running for senator.

This collection of short stories, which were considered controversial during the author's time, provides a scathing commentary on the culture of materialism as well as the class issues between the wealthy and the poor. Reissue.

Anthony Di Renzo makes available for the first time since their original publication some eighty years ago a collection of fifteen of Sinclair Lewis's early business stories. Among Lewis's funniest satires, these stories introduce the characters, themes, and techniques that would evolve into Babbitt. Each selection reflects the commercial culture of Lewis's day, particularly Reason Why advertising, self-help manuals, and the business fiction of the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were published between October 1915 and May 1921 (nine in the Saturday Evening Post, four in Metropolitan Magazine, one in Harper's Magazine, and one in American Magazine). Because some things have not changed in the American workplace since Lewis's day, these highly entertaining and unflinchingly accurate office satires will appeal to the fans of Dilbert and The Drew Carey Show. In a sense, they provide lay readers with an archaeology of white-collar angst and regimentation. The horror and absurdities of contemporary corporate downsizing already existed in the office of the Progressive Era. For an audience contemplating the death of the American middle class, Lewis's stories provide an important retrospective on earlier times and a preliminary autopsy on the American dream. Appearing just in time to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Babbitt, this collection rescues Lewis's best early short fiction from obscurity, provides extensive information about his formative years in advertising and public relations, and analyzes both his genius for marketing and his carefully cultivated persona as the Great Salesman of American letters.

A New England newspaper editor fights to destroy the fascist dictatorship established by President Berzelius Windrip in this classic work by the author of Babbit, Arrowsmith, and Main Street that prophesizes the coming of totalitarianism in the United States. Reissue.

After a series of hopeless dead-end jobs, Una Golden gets married, only to find that maybe working wasn't, by comparison, so bad. JOB was one of Lewis's first successes, and it describes vividly the world of work for women in the early years of the 20th century.

In this unusual and somewhat polemical novel by Sinclair Lewis, a white man discovers that he has an African-American ancestor. Lauded by blacks as an important book, KINGSBLOOD ROYAL was denounced by white critics as "unconvincing," and it was a failure when it was published in 1947. Lewis's novel was definitely ahead of its time in its treatment of race relations and the phenomenon of "passing."

Carol Kennicott marries a small-town doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, hoping that her idealistic belief in social reform can be realized. Instead, she observes firsthand the stifling realities of small town life--cultural narrowness, smugness, petty cruelties--and finds that her marriage can't survive what she learns. Sinclair Lewis's best-selling 1920 novel was controversial in its time because of its gritty refusal to romanticize small-town life--one of America's fondest myths.

Thirteen stories selected by Lewis himself which illustrate the wide range of his art and interests.

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.

A collection of critical essays on Lewis's novel arranged in chronological order of original publication.

A guide to reading "Babbitt" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample test, term paper suggestions, and a reading list.