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Sinclair
Lewis Books
Reviewed by Patrick Killough ( Click on the blue titles for on-line texts of reviews.) P L U S SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR HARRY SINCLAIR LEWIS Works by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
1912 Hike and the Aeroplane (published under the pseudonym Tom Graham). Gerald ("Hike") Griffin and his lovable overweight sidekick Torrington ("Poodle") Darby, help an inventor land a million dollar contract with the U.S. Army Signal Corps to purchase his amazing flying machine. They contend with evil Captain Welch. There is much background history from the earliest days of heavier-than air aviation. 1914 Our Mr. Wrenn. Do-no-harm hero WIlliam Wrenn bumbles along from 1910, when he is 34, to 1913. He begins and ends in New York with a few weeks interlude of 'romantic adventure' in England. In The Souvenir and Art Novelty Company he is the ever reassuring 'Our Mr. Wrenn,' whose kindly signature on letters to customers (especially in the South) firms up the market for the firm's silly trifles. 1915 The Trail of the Hawk. This is about the boyhood, youth, and later career in early aviation of Norwegian American Carl Ericson, born1885. When he was eight years old in Joralemon, Minnesota, Carl ran off on impulse into a cold night with Gertrude ('Gertie') Cowles, three years his senior. Again and again he will run off somewhere new. Occasionally he will long for a return to Joralemon and Gertie. 1917 The Job. THE JOB spans ten years 1905 - 1915. Heroine is Miss Una Golden. At tale's beginning she is 24 and living in Panama, Pennsylvania. The rest of the story is about Una's determination both to find romantic love with a good man and to make a man's career for herself in business. Una studies a new, innovative chain of hotels, does field research and then convinces the chain's partners to hire her, at age 34, to be in charge of the chain's departments for catering, service, decoration and related services. At $4,000/year! 1917 The Innocents: A Story for Lovers. On the brink of World War II Seth and Sarah Jane Appleby break out of Seth's 40 year rut of selling shoes in the same New York City store. On the basis of one overcharged snack during a summer vacation, they sell all they own and open their own Tea Shop on Cape Cod. It fails. Seth cannot get his old job back. They wander from New York to West Virginia where they transform manners and morals of a hobo jungle. The hoboes scatter and begin the legend of two rich old eccentrics wandering the world doing good. Ultimately, the Applebys find happiness back in the shoe business in small town Indiana. 1919 Free Air. Chivalrous plodding male (small-town Minnesota mechanic MILTON [MILT] DAGGETT) drives ditzy Brooklyn socialite Miss CLAIR BOLTWOOD and her father towards a visit with cousins in distant Seattle. Their temptation to dally and to play crosses their ambition to work and make something of themselves. 1920 Main Street. Mystical Carol Milford brings impossible dreams of perfection both to her marriage with a small town doctor, Will Kennicott, a dozen years her senior , as well as to her first few years living with him in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Her blitzkrieg attempts at reform the town all fail in the short run. Sexual and personal fulfilment also elude her. But a few experimental months working in Washington, DC convince her to return to her husband's small town Main Street even with its Village Virus. 1922 Babbitt. George Follansbee Babbitt in April 1920 is a modestly successful husband, father, realtor, Presbyterian, Republican, Booster and Elk. A year or so later his life is temporarily in tatters as he strikes out for personal freedom. He chases women, runs with a smart set, neglects his office to go to movies, toys dangerously with sympathy for labor union and strikers and flouts the mores of the industrial city of Zenith. But under social pressure from peers and social superiors he sinks back into predictable, harmless, mediocre Amedrican normalcy. 1925 Arrowsmith. An idealistic doctor cannot find his life's goal in traditonal medicine. Despite many temptations and detours he finally commits himself to scientific research in a modest, celibate community of two like-minded males far from big city life and commercial success. 1926 Mantrap. Ralph Prescott, 40 year old bachelor, mama's boy and burnt out New York lawyer accepts an offer to rough it one summer in the Canadian wilderness. He is befriended by Joe Easter, a backwoodsman, and tempted by Joe's flirtatious ex-manicurist wife Alverna. 1927 Elmer Gantry. "Elmer Gantry was drunk" is the novel's first sentence about the hero during his college football days. Despite occasional lapses into altruism and piety, Gantry mainly uses religion as a tool for his personal social advance. 1928 The Man Who Knew Coolidge. One man does all the talking: the hero, Lowell T. Schmaltz, who retails office supplies in the mythical midwestern American city of Zenith in the state of Winnemac. He parlays his fleeting college acquaintance with future President Calvin Coolidge into a platform from which to parade views on life, politics and mores to traveling salesmen and any others who cannot escape hearing. "The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship" is the title of Schmalz's remarks at Pilgrim Congregational Church. Rev. Dr. Elmer Gantry is in the audience, visiting from New York 1929 Dodsworth. Retired businessman Samuel Dodsworth travels from Zenity to Europe with his increasingly unsatisfactory wife Frances (Fran). He drops her for someone more compatible. 1933 Ann Vickers. The novel carries the heroine from birth in 1889 to her early 40s around 1933. She progresses from pre-pubescent tomboy to a teen with a crush and through losing mother and father before college. Ann studies nursing, does graduate work in social work-related fields, is awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, publishes a book on 'Vocational Training in Women's Reformatories' and becomes a columnist with a national following. 1934 Work of Art. The novel covers from 1882 till 1933 through the ups and downs of three generations of the Weagle family and their varying attitudes to the art of hotel management. Focus is on the second generation, two brothers Myron and Ora. Myron is the plodding, steady, predictable Tortoise. Ora is the mercurial, chore-dodging Hare. Myron moves slowly up and eventually down the ladder of management of American hotels, always searching for and never finding or building his ideal inn. 1935 It Can't Happen Here. Small-town Vermont editor Doremus Jessop interacts with neighbors and fellow Rotarians as an unscrupulous but popular western Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic Party nomination in 1936. Within eight days of winning the general election, President Windrip cows Congress into giving him power to legislate by decree. Step by step campaign rhetoric gives way to lying, deceit, violence, concentration camps and torture. Rotarians and others variously collaborate and resist. 1938 The Prodigal Parents. Frederick William Cornplow ("Fred"), turning 56, is a very successful retailer and wholesaler of automobiles and recreational vehicles. He takes good financial care of parents and siblings. He is fond of his kindly wife Hazel. But he draws the line at coddling his demanding daughter, 28 year old Vassar graduate Sara who still lives at home with no sign of moving out. There is also Fred's and Hazel's handsome college student son Howard, an impractical dreamer of fantastic dreams. The two children hatch plans to compel their parents to take care of them forever. 1940 Bethel Merriday. The novel traces a young actress's theatrical career from high school dramatics, through summer stock and a touring company, to her first Broadway appearance. 1943 Gideon Planish. Gideon Planish, born a midwesterner in 1892 and reared evangelically, by age ten sensed that his gift of gab would take him far. He sometimes rose and sometimes fell, lurching generally upwards in an occasionally ruthless career that touched academia, advertising and management of philanthropic organizations. As his physical vigor and belief in what he was doing slowly left him, his much younger wife Peony swelled from docile supporter of his great work and frivolous spender of his income into a powerhouse with developed skills networking among wives and daughters of the rich and famous. 1945 Cass Timberlane. Cass Timberlane at tale's beginning was a 41 year old elected judge in the fictional city of Great Republic, Minnesota. He was smitten by a young out of town, 'radical,' whom he first noticed when she testified in a trial before his bench. Virginia (Ginny) Marshland. Their marriage has its ups and downs. 1947 Kingsblood Royal. in Grand Republic, Minnesota (population 85,000), an unremarkable but rising white banker and World War I veteran, Captain Neil Kingsblood, learns that he is 1/32 Negro and debates whether, as a matter of morality, he should secede from the Caucasian race. 1949 The God-Seeker. As a youngster, Aaron Gadd, experienced 'the western New England hills ... and the winter stillness.' Later as a crafstsmanlike carpenter and succesful building contractor in booming pre-Civil War St. Paul on the Minnesota frontier, Aaron Gadd rescued runaway slaves and also created an in- house labor union. 1951 World So Wide. Young Mr Hayden Chart survives a car wreck which kills his wife. He seeks solace abroad, spending much time in Florence, Italy, which he studies as the architect he has been. He is tempted to build his life around two women-- both at once, if possible. The first is ultra intellectual American Dr Olivia Lomond, a student of Renaissance, Italy. Or there is also a fellow small town American, reporter Roxanna Eldritch. She is unpretentious, honest and has secretly loved Hayden Chart since she was ten and he eighteen. Chart and his friends interact with Florence's expatriate community, including the Dodsworths of Zenith. -OOO- =-==-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-= SOME BOOKS BEARING
ON
SINCLAIR LEWIS
-OOO---Harold
BLOOM (editor). SINCLAIR LEWIS (Modern Critical VIews). New York.
Chelsea House. 1987. viii. 144 pp.
--Martin BUCCO. MAIN STREET: THE REVOLT OF CAROL KENNICOTT. New York. Twane Publishers. 1993. xiii. 144 pp. --Hallie FLANAGAN. ARENA. New York. Duell, Sloan and Pierce. 1940. 475 pp. [NOTE: This is a history by its director of the New Deal's The Federal Theatre Project. PP. 114 - 129 contain photos and the chapter "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" on Sinclair Lewis's contribution to the Project.] --Anthony Channell HILFER. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE: 1915 - 1930. Chapel Hill. U of NC Press. 1969. 275 pp. --James M. HUTCHISSON. THE RISE OF SINCLAIR LEWIS, 1920 - 1930. University Park PA. Pennsylvania Stare University Press. 1996. 2nd printing 1997. xii. 276 pp. --Grace Hegger LEWIS. WITH LOVE FROM GRACIE: SINCLAIR LEWIS: 1912 - 1925. viii. 335 pp. --Richard LINGEMAN. SINCLAIR LEWIS: REBEL FROM MAIN STREET. New York. Random House. 2002. xxiii. 659 pp. --Sally E. PARRY (editor). GO EAST, YOUNG MAN: SINCLAIR LEWIS ON CLASS IN AMERICA. New York. Signet Classics. 2005. xvii. 329 pp. --Mark SCHORER. SINCLAIR LEWIS: AN AMERICAN LIFE. New York. McGraw-Hill. 1961. xxiii. 867 pp. --Vincent SHEEAN. DOROTHY AND RED. New York. Crest Books. 1963. 320 pages. (paper) --Vincent SHEEAN. PERSONAL HISTORY. Secaucus, NJ. Citadel Press. 1934. 1969. xvii. 403 pp. =-=-=-=- 11/03/2005 file: sinclairlewis_lists&reviews.html |