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This collection contains the early works of Sinclair Lewis, including 'Main Street' and his acclaimed critique of materialism, 'Babbitt.'

Contents:

Our Mr. Wrenn
The Trail of the Hawk
The Innocents
The Job
Free Air
Main Street
Babbitt

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Customer Reviews (3)

In 1915 women had few resources for rising above menial office work
In ten years, 1905 - 1915, Miss Una Goldman, heroine of Sinclair Lewis's 1917 novel THE JOB, moves from24 year old economic nobody in backwater Panama, Pennsylvania to success in business at age 34 in cutthroat New York City.She is not pretty, not well educated. How then does she rise in a man's world?

First, she is friendly and makes enough affable acquaintances and a few friends (increasinglythey are women) that she creates a booster or referral network which she can call on and does call on. Networking, beginning with contacts in a New York City commercial school, from time to time help her find a better job: first just stenographic, then secretarial and lightly supervisory and finally with real responsibility for selling real estate. On her own she markets herself to her final employer who takes her into his recently formed and expanding chain of hotels as a manager of several departments.

Along the way Una Golden forms a crush on a man who leaves New York for a better job in Omaha. She later marries unsuitably an alcoholic womanizer much older than she. Him she dumps eventually as he becomes more and more a lazy sponger. In the end she is reunited, most implausibly, at age 34 with her first love and the implication is that they will marry, have children and both continue to work -- something her old fashioned husband forbade Una to do once he was back on his feet economically.

Unlike ELMER GANTRY or THE GOD SEEKER, Sinclair Lewis's THE JOB is relentlessly, single-mindedly, depressingly secular and this worldly. Here are some of the very few references of any kind to organized religion.

Of Una's father just before he dies at novel's beginning:"He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party." ( Ch. I).

On their first dinner date, Una's first boyfriend (who returns in triumph at novel's end) asks "Which god do you favor at present -- Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?" Una thought that they all worshipped the same God. He says that the same God can't both approve candles and music in an Episcopal Church and reveal to the Plymouth Brotherhood the wickedness of organs and candles." Una agrees that she really does not care which church is right. He goes on to say that church buildings are touted as God's houses but are allowed by congregants to be ugly. But he admits that his real thoughts about almost anything are critical and negative. End of discussion. (Ch V)

Another suitor spoke with Una after "(s)he had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous and showed it." (Ch. IX)

Una moved into a rather posh and nominally strict boarding house for working women that as a matter of policy admitted "East Side Jews" but "no agnostics or Catholics." Yet Una's roommate, a Roman Catholic, had got away with telling the landlady that she was a "Romanist Episcopalian." Una's encounters with Jewish men and women in various levels of New York business were invariably friendly and productive. Decisively helpful later in Una's business rise was her lame Jewish boarding housemate Miss Mamie Magen, who was brilliant and increasingly well connected in charitable circles. (Ch. XI) Mamie was scornful of "half-churches, half-governments, half-educations." Mamie explained New York to Una, brought the metropolis to life. Thanks to Mamie Magen, Una found a two week temporary job with thejobbing firm of Herzfeld and Cohn, two white-bearded Orthodox Jews. Una had had nebulous prejudices of the Jews thenbeginning to conquer New York business. Yet the two partners had merry eyes, gestures of sympathy and created a pleasant, companionable office environment. They were not tyrants but patriarchs, elder workers. They made their office "a joyous adventure." Una looked forward each day to her work and learned lessons she would later apply elsewhere about how to humanize the work place. (Ch. XIV) In her next to last office, the dynamic Jewish partner in a real estate office proposed marriage, but Una merely admired him, did not love him. (Ch. XVI)

With her Catholic roommate Una "attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights ... ; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism." (Ch. XII) In the first two years of her marriage, Una's salesman husband was out of town 2/3 of the time and she herself did not work. To keep her shorthand alive, she took down "the miscellaneous sermons -- by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or anyone else handy -- with which she filled up her dull Sundays. ... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz (her husband) was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons." (Ch. XVI)

In THE JOB Sinclair Lewis shows little belief in religion as able to uplift and change lives of his characters. And those lives emphatically need uplifting from the relentlessly dull, stressful, slave-like conditions most women face in their low-paying office jobs. Sinclair Lewis's women generally see only two ways out of having to work: to marry or to die in harness. A few women such as Una Golden and Mamie Magen break out of their pre-ordained ruts and create a third possibility: doing better work than their men colleagues and convincing progressive bosses to give them a chance to prove themselves.

-OOO-

of some interest, perhaps
I found this to be somewhat inferior to his other early novels (i.e., before Main Street). He is more slick in that professional writer's way here; I like him better when he was willing to take some stylistic risks;but nothing like that happens here. Main Street may not be a masterpiece,but it is certainly more interesting and unusual than this one.

Decent account of Women in the workplace.
Sinclair's first critically successful work has similar soundings to MainStreet and Ann Vickers.The novel describes the adventures of Una Goldenas she learns to survive the daily grind of working for a living in deadend jobs.

Lewis vividly describes the dullness and hopelessnesssurrounding typical "women's work" in the early 1900's.Lewisalso shows that marrying can also be a dead end in itself, especially whenone marries to simply escape working.

I liked this book quite a bit. However, it lacked the bite and suspense of Ann Vickers or even MainStreet.This book should be read by Lewis fans or those with an interestin the early 20th century workplace. ... Read more

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The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Sinclair Lewis is in the English language. If you enjoy the works of Sinclair Lewis then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. ... Read more

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CASS TIMBERLANE- A NOVEL OF HUSBANDS AND WIVES by SINCLAIR LEWIS.The scene of this story, the small city of Grand Republic in Central Minnesota, is entirely imaginary, as are all the characters. But I know tJiat the diameters will be identified, each of them with several different real persons in each of the Minne sota cities in which I have happily lingered: in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Winona, St. Cloud, Mankato, Fergus Falls and par ticularly, since it is only a little larger than Grand Republic and since I live there, in the radiant, sea-fronting, hillside city of Duluth. All such guesses will be wrong, but they will be so convincing that even the writer will be astonished to learn how exactly he has drawn some judge or doctor or banker or housewife of whom he has never heard, or regretful to discover how poison ously he is supposed to have described people of whom he is particularly fond. I UNTIL JINNY MARSHLAND was called to the stand, the Judge was deplorably sleepy. The case of Miss Tilda Hatter vs. the City of Grand Republic had been yawning its way through testimony about a not very interesting sidewalk. Plaintiffs attorney desired to show that the city had been remarkably negligent in leaving upon that side walk a certain lump of ice which, on February 7, 1941, at or about the hour of 9: 37 P. M., had caused the plaintiff to slip, to slide, and to be prone upon the public way, in a state of ignominy and sore pain. There had been an extravagant amount of data as to whether the lump of ice had been lurking sixteen, eighteen, or more than eighteen feet from the Clipper Hardware Store. And all that May afternoon the windows had been closed, to keep out street noises, and the court room had smelled, as it looked, like a schoolroom. Timberlane, J., was in an agony of drowsiness. He was faith ful enough, and he did not miss a word, but he heard it all as in sleep one hears malignant snoring. He was a young judge: the Honorable Cass Timberlane, of the Twenty-Second Judicial District, State of Minnesota. He was forty-one, and in his first year on the bench, after a term in Congress. He was a serious judge, a man of learning, a believer in the majesty of the law, and he looked like a tall Red Indian. But he was wishing that he were out bass-fishing, or at home, reading Walden or asleep on a cool leather couch. Preferably asleep. All the spectators in the room, all five of them, were yawning and chewing gum. The learned counsel for the plaintiff, Mr. Hervey Plint, the dullest lawyer in Grand Republic, a middle aged man with a miscellaneous sort of face, was questioning Miss Hatter. He was a word-dragger, an uh'er, a looker to the ceiling for new thoughts. Uh Miss Hatter, now will you tell us what was the uh the purpose of ^ our going out, that evening I mean, I mean 3 how did you happen to be out on an evening which I think all the previous testimony agrees that it was, well, I mean, uh, you might call it an inclement evening, but not such as would have prevented the, uh, the adequate cleaning of the thorough* fares - ' Jekshn leading quest, said the city attorney. Jekshn stained, said the Court. I will rephrase my question/' confided Mr. Flint. He was a willing rephraser, but the phrases always became duller and duller and duller. Sitting above them on the bench like Chief Iron Cloud, a lean figure of power, the young father of 'his people, Judge Timberlane started to repeat* the list of presidents, a charm which usually would keep him awake. He got through it fairly well, stumbling only on Martin Van Buren and Millard Fill more, as was reasonable, but he remained as sleepy as ever. Without missing any of Miss Hatter's more spectacular state ments, His Honor plunged ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

of merit
Most argue that the late Sinclair Lewis works shows an author whose powers have seriously declined. Though I don't disagree, I still think Cass Timberlane is worth reading. It serves as an interesting contrast to the earlier novels. Lewis still has his acrid and acerbic view of American life - he skewers Minnesota and New York City with equal ease. However, he seems to see, at the end of his career, that there is some redemptive moment in life. True, you might find this rather sentimental, but I see it as a synthesis of his earlier Menckenism with the later romance of the swing era. Indeed, this book has many elements of the twenties, but they are tempered by the forties. Having just read Wolfe's Of Time and the River, I noticed that Wolfe was apparently influenced by Lewis. Even as Wolfe surpassed Lewis in achievement, he also brought his novels to a resolution that left an impression of hope and survival.

Cass Timberlane

This book is masterfully written and reveals a tremendous insight into the nature of human beings by its author, Sinclair Lewis.Cass Timberlane, a middle-aged, divorced judge in a moderate-sized city in Minnesota, is smitten by a pretty twenty-something girl who passes through his court room one fine day.While Jinny has good looks, youth and, a personality all her own, the Judge readily grafts his own ideal of his perfect mate onto this attractive not-so-blank slate.He never wavers in his perfect vision of this imperfect person and the seeds of discontent and relationship failure are sown from the moment they met.Jinny, for her part, tries to tell the Judge who she really is but he will not see it.Unfortunately, she is both seduced by the opportunity he represents for her and lacks the strong sense of self (and, selfishly, desire) necessary to shake him from his illusion.This culminates in a disasterous and doomed marriage.The author plays this out in a brilliant, witty and realistic manner that makes for a fascinating read.Interspersed throughout the novel are vignettes of couples and people whom we meet along the way.It is often said that the only people who truly know what happens in a relationship are the two who are in it.To read these shorts is to extend that knowledge to a silent, invisible, third party observer.Many of them are unpleasant and not all of them work but they offer a peek behind the veneer of contentment and normalcy that couples present to the rest of the world.As Cass and Jinny spiral out of control and the arguments come faster and faster without logic or reason, the author offers up the explanation that "But of them all, there was only one cause; they did not know what they wanted." While it would appear that most who have reviewed this book think their relationship ends in a triumph of love, I beg to differ.At the end, Cass still sees Jinny as unrealistically as he always has and Jinny has been beaten down to the point of being "...mildly sad about it, just enough to assert her non-existent independence...".She cannot make love to him because the love of another man still holds her heart.When she comes into his bedroom because she is too cold from the Minnesota night, he sees it as an act of reconcilation and, finally, requited love.However, she swears she'll fix her storm windows so she can go back to her bedroom and so the cycle will go on and on with two people who are hopelessly caught by each other.

What makes a marriage work?

Near the end of this novel Sinclair Lewis writes, "If the world ever learns that it knows nothing yet about what keeps men and women loving each other, then will it have a chance for some brief happiness before the eternal frozen night set in?" In relating the married life of Judge Cass Timberlane and his wife Jinny, Lewis ponders the question and offers nothing more than "patience" as a possible answer.

Cass Timberlane, 41 and divorced, falls for Jinny Marshland, a girl from the other side of the tracks who is half his age. Everyone, just about, tries to dissuade him from what they see as a romantic fling with little chance of permanence resulting, but Timberlane is determined to marry her. And he does. And she flies the coop. She falls in love with Bradd Criley and runs off to NYC with him. But she becomes deathly ill there, and Timberlane "rescues" her and she realizes she loves her husband after all. Interspersed throughout the novel are a number of "assemblages," very short snapshots of various good and bad marriages (mostly bad), Lewis's commentary on the marriage situation in middle-class America. He has the chauvinistic view that most bad marriages are the fault of the woman. At the end of one early assemblage, though, he espouses a pretty clear view about successful marriages: "My experience" [Dr. Drover says] "is that it's all nonsense to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated modern life on top of the fundamental clashes of the sexes. It's all perfectly easy if the husband just understands women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles. You bet!" It's exactly what Timberlane is able to do with Jinny and thus keep their marriage together. Lewis's writing is breezy and natural, especially the dialogue. Other than for the rather old-fashioned and melodramatic ending, the book is pretty good.
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MARTIN ARROWSMITH SINCLAIR LEWIS JONATHAN CAPE LTD THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON FIRST PUBLISHED MARCH MCMXXV REPRINTED APRIL MCMXXV REPRINTED MARCH MCMXXVJ MADE 6f PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BUTLER TANNER LTD FROME AND LONDON 5 To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his help in the planning of the fable itself for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of com panionship while working on the book, in the United States, in the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontainebleau. I wish I could reproduce our talks along the way, and the laboratory afternoons, the restaurants at night, and the deck at dawn as we steamed into tropic ports. SINCLAIR LEWIS MARTIN ARROWSMITH CHAPTER i THE driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela - the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beauti ful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats. She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered, Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess hed take us in. Nobody aint going to take us in she said. Were going on jus long as we can. Going West Theys a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire, alone. That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith. s Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickersons office, a boy was reading Grays Anatomy. His name was Martin Arrow smith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac. There was a suspicion in Elk Mills now, in 1897, a dowdy red brick village, smelling of apples that this brown-leather adjust able seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a barbers chair. There was also a belief that its pro prietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair. Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at 7 8 MARTIN ARROWSMITH fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call he took charge - though what there was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of inde pendence, and a hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday-school superintendent. Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as Jewish, and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of Primitive Britain, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede. It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to be come a Great Healer... ... Read more

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Volume from set of Sinclair Lewis' works published by Collier in matched bindings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Eternally Wonderful
Anyone who's resided in a small town or its modern incarnation, suburbia, will recognize the American Homeland in these pages, despite it taking place almost a hundred years ago. Gopher Prairie is a small town full of small minds, small ideas and small ambitions. Carol Blodget, a vivacious young woman who works in a St. Paul library for the love of books and dreams big dreams, falls in love and marries Dr. Will Kennicott, and follows him to his beloved home town.

Carol's is a familiar life story: woman leaves big city to follow man she loves to a place she is in no way suited to, and ends up feeling trapped among people she despises. She tries to change the town, she tries to change herself, and when all else fails she tries to have an affair. When none of these tactics produce the desired results, Carol finally leaves Gopher Prairie, small child in tow. Unlike most women--and only because Will Kennicott is an exceedingly kind, loving man who doesn't go ballistic over her leaving--Carol eventually returns, but not until she's learned more about the world and herself, enabling her to live in Gopher Prairie impervious to the tyranny of Main Street.

The picture Lewis portrays of Midwesterners isn't pretty--in fact, it's downright misanthropic. These are myopic people who walk through their lives half asleep, frightened of anything new, whether it's a triviality like a brightly colored dress, or "communism" in the form of a workers' union. The writing is rich and detailed: each character springs from the page to life, with personalities revealed by the tiniest of mannerisms. The way they talk to one another, the jokes they tell, the things they consider important (primarily money and appearances) come through in each sentence and paragraph. The style is smooth and natural, never calling attention to itself, never detracting from the story.

As you've probably figured out by now, Main Street is a genuine classic in the sense that its themes are eternal. Not only does it offer a historical perspective on America, but its concerns still resonate today. Though some of the issues may have changed, the people of Gopher Prairie are scarily familiar.

I don't know if Lewis meant to convey city living as far superior to small towns--he may have chosen the latter as a locale in order to illuminate America's most extreme conservatism--but that's definitely something I got out of Main Street, possibly because of my own experiences. By now I've spent more of my life in cities than in small towns, for which I am extraordinarily grateful. Every time I lived anywhere other than in a city I hungered to be back in one. Even now, in a city with pockets of suburban-ish streets, one of which I live on, I long for the gridlock of New York, the freedom of big-city anonymity, where ideas and culture swarm everywhere--on the bus and in the street.

Sinclair Lewis was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930, and Main Street was the book that first won him critical recognition. Long live the American novelist!


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Babbitt
Free Air
The Innocents
The Job
Main Street
Our Mr. Wrenn
The Trail of the Hawk ... Read more

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A brand-new collection of Sinclair Lewis's prolific body of short fiction, focusing on the author's primary concerns: the issue of class, work and money in America. ... Read more