Product Description
Main Street is a satirical novel that is important for different reasons - one of them is the portrayal of a strong female protagonist, inside what could be seen as a feminist theme by a male writer in the beginning of the 20th century. ... Read more

Product Description
Touring Europe with his beautiful but spoiled wife Fran, millionaire Sam Dodsworth, known as the American Captain of Industry, witnesses the clash of American and English cultures at the same time his marriage falls apart. Reissue. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Rat race addiction versus mid life crisis
What do you think is the purpose of life? Loafing?
The title hero is a man of 51, a captain of mid-Western industry, who has just sold his car company to a larger competitor, whose kids are just about grown up, whose wife feels young and restless in her early 40. He agrees to go on a trip to Europe with her, rather than starting a management job with the new owner of his company immediately. That's about where their agreement ends.

He is thinking of a lazy tour before going back to work, but she has larger things in mind, a change of life, a `new challenge' (one of my favorite clichés in consultant speak), a social rise, maybe an ambassadorship... Her ambitions are not this. The marriage flounders under a heavy stress test.
The trip to Europe becomes a confrontation with reality: marital alienation, so long overlooked with the hectic social life at home; inability to enjoy leisure, to absorb different social settings, to feel at home away from home.

Travels involve confrontations with one's own self and with the truth. It is harder to escape into routine lies. New definitions are needed. The wife turns out to be an unbearable snob and worse. Lewis' sympathies are fully with him, who remains a decent half barbarian.
The other main theme, apart from couples in midlife, is `innocents abroad'. It is an update on Europe in the 1920s, and how Americans react to it. That has a huge autobiographical component, I bet.

Dodsworth is a good guy by Lewis standards. He is not detestable like Babbitt, nor obnoxious like Gantry, nor obsessed like Arrowsmith. He is not eccentric and has no outstanding features. He is a good American guy. He just doesn't get it.

The book is a pleasant and entertaining read. Lewis' insight in American society and in individual psychology is substantial. His style is funny and easygoing.
His style is based on the search for humor wherever he can find it. He has developed a technique which is amusing, but becomes a wee bit tedious after a while, because the pattern is so repetitive.
Some examples.
Example 1: his grey-threaded brown mustache was fully as eccentric and showy as a doormat.
Example 2: she was interested in every aspect of these leagues except perhaps the purpose for which they had been founded, and no Indiana politician was craftier at soaping enemies, advising friends, and building up a political machine to accomplish nothing in particular.
Example 3: he had a magnificent lack of scruples; he made up for his runtiness by barking at people.
Lewis was a very observant writer, with a lot to say, but little depth in saying it. He was more a journalist than a novelist.
Still, considering that the last review of this book here is several years old is also a bit sad.
P.S. nearly forgot to point to one of my favorite lines: the redneck foreign correspondent, who pretends to be lowbrow so as not to raise suspicion with his peers, but secretly prefers Conrad over Conan Doyle. Attaboy!

A Novel That Sings Like Middle American Opera
Sinclair Lewis's 1929 novel DODSWORTH has staying power. It remains widely read. It was made into a Broadway stage play and then a 1936 motion picture nominated for seven Academy Awards. Imagine Giancarlo Menotti or Leonard Bernstein turning DODSWORTH into an opera of Midwestern passion and rhetoric! Published the year before its author became America's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, DODSWORTH repeats and intensifies a number of themes, at least onevisible as early as 1912's HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE.

--The hero, automobile pioneer Samuel Dodsworth, wonders whether there adimension to corporate life beyond sheer hard work and sticking to what one knows best. If so what is it? Travel? Leisure? The life of the mind? Good conversation? An absorbing hobby? A wife supportive of both his business and non-business quests?

--Is travel in the sense of sheer moving from here to there, from one place to another, out roughing it on the long trail, the ultimate solution? Must man move incessantly in order to be happy? In New York City, after some months in a more relaxed, contemplative Europe, Dodsworth saw Manhattan as "veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed." That God of Speed "demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for. A demanding God, this Speed, ... who once he had been offered a hundred miles an hour, straightway demanded a hundred and fifty" (Ch. 16).

--Midwestern Americans, makers of national greatness, at their best are regularly accused by Sinclair Lewis of being ordinary, conformist, risk avoiders. Without their Babbitry, their service clubs, their lodges and their main-line churches,American business leaders of the second magnitude are nothing, certainly not the legendary American pioneers of yesteryear! In some ways, Sam Dodsworth at 50 was therefore not a typical product of midwestern Zenith. He was "perfectly, the American Captain of Industry. ... (But) He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. ... He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business" (Ch.2). When Dodsworth opted for a few months of travel abroad before jumping back into the rat race, the man who bought out his company accused him of thinking that the purpose of life is loafing, whereas, "I tell you, Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion. ... Do big things" (Ch. 3). In London, even his wife Fran accused Dodworth (who had attended only one Rotary lunch in his life) of wanting to be "back in all the Rotarian joys of Zenith" (Ch. 11). Ross Ireland, a world traveler journalist told Dodsworth that one reason he loved America so passionately was that its "Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic Federation are (not) any more grab-it-all than the English merchant" (Ch. 16). In discussing America's appeal to him with emerging lady friend Edith Cortwright, Sam Dodsworth ironically concluded that there are only two good reasons for American businessmen to travel abroad: to attend "a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he's well insulated from furriners. Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge!" (Ch. 31)

--Another recurring Sinclair Lewis riddle is the relation of husband to wife. Does a great American achiever really need a wife? If so, why? She dare not be his intellectual or entrepreneurial equal. She is permitted a few innocent distractions from running a household and raising children. Dancing and country clubbing are all right. Flirting with other men is frowned upon. And Dodsworth has absolutely no empathy for wife Fran as she frenetically reasserts her youth and her right not to be known as a grandmother. Above all, she has no right to carp at him, to put him in his place before his friends or hers.

DODSWORTH was written by Sinclair Lewis at the height of his powers. If Samuel Dodsworth is a brooding Prince Hamlet among American business leaders, he is a distinctly understated American Hamlet. Yes, Sam Dodsworth is more Socratic than a Babbitt or a Rotarian but less human than the troubled, seeking sinners of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

-OOO-

Not Lewis' Best
As a huge fan of "Babbitt" and especially "Main Street," I was happy to have come across an old edition of "Dodsworth" in a used bookstore.I tore into it eagerly but soon came up short.Neither satire like "Babbitt" nor as psychologically astute as "Main Street," the book reads like something from a middle school book club.The colloquialisms are corn-pone, far more prominent than in "Babbitt."Sam's reactions to his ocean voyages and to Europe are child-like, as are his inner responses to his wife's intolerable behaviors.The soap opera-ish inner monologues do not ring true, containing embarrassing proclamations about Great Europe and marital resolutions.Sam Dodsworth is painted as so naive, trusting, xenophobic and insecure that it is difficult to accept that he had an Ivy League education and was a master of business and industry.

The characterizations, in fact, strain credibility.How a man50 years of age, president of an auto manufacturing company, can be so entirely innocent of the customs of the U.S. and the world outside his small city is baffling.He evidences no ability for making small talk, is ignorant of all current events and politics, is absent of even minor social charms with the rich-- all of these traits are overexaggerated for the purposes of the book.That Dodsworth and his wife have such a sudden disaffection and disenchantment ignores the certain difficulties of raising two children and navigating 20 years of maariage.It seems unlikely that Fran's pretentions emerge only on their trip. Certainly her preferences and choices in managing a family would have foreshadowed these problems.

A common criticism of Lewis's body of work is its uneveness.The depth and success of "Main Street" are contrasted with many of his later writings.I found "Dodsworth" too to read more like a novelization of an early screenplay, exaggerated and distorted for dramatic effect.

"Trophy Wife Dumps Hubby for Euro-Glitz"
No doubt, this one is for your 'must read' list. When you put it down, you will feel you've lost contact with some great characters, that you've really got inside a marriage, that you've seen life the way it can be.

Samuel Dodsworth is an automobile magnate in the early years of the business. When his company is bought-out, he's left free at age 50, to do whatever he wants. But he has a slick, steel-willed, glamorous socialite for a wife and she has ambitions of climbing. He had always been "too busy to be discontented, and he managed to believe that Fran loved him.""(p.11) Sam gets roped into an extended European tour. Turns out, he's just an escort and backdrop for her movie. He experiences rising discomfort as she worms her way into European high society (or what she takes to be such). The trip gives both of them the first chance in decades to find out who they are---the common motif in literature and life of travelling to discover yourself---and they realize that they don't have much in common. Their European experiences transform them. On a visit back to the States, Dodsworth finds that he has changed; he can't regard his old friends, their old routines and concerns, and their ways with the same equanimity. They have become provincial and empty in his eyes, but what has he become ? He slowly comes to the conclusion that he's cut loose from all the went before, but has no direction for the future. He takes up several possibilities, but is caught among the rocks of loving the wayward Fran, wanting to do something useful in the world, and needing love himself. It's a long haul, but he makes it. Lewis skillfully keeps the psychological tension going to the very last page. Great stuff ! As for Fran, you'll have to read the book.

DODSWORTH is a psychological study of the first order, sincere, unpretentious and so well-written. It is not a satire on the lines of "Main Street", "Babbitt" or "Elmer Gantry", but a serious novel in the full sense of the word. Samuel Dodsworth comes across as a solid man of conservative nature who may have once been in a rut, but learns to think far more than people ever give him credit for, particularly his wife. He becomes flexible and learns to live, while Fran only continues to consume and demand. The plot plays itself out amidst a background of constant discussion as to what makes an American, what makes a European and what are the differences ? While this theme fascinated Henry James and numbers of other writers, it seems a bit passé in this day of the Web, 7 hour flights across 'the pond', massive tourism, MBAs in Europe and great museums in America. Still, it's part of the ambiance of the 1920s when this novel was written. The slow dissolution of the marriage, the contradictions of personality, the existence of strengths and weaknesses, aggressive and passive roles in both husband and wife, the psychological disintegration and re-building of a man's self-image-these are the main themes of DODSWORTH. It's one of the great American novels.

A delightful read
"Dodsworth" harkens to a day when you took time to read books, to savor words, descriptions, phrases, conversations between people.This is not a fast beach read, but a book to enjoy at a slow pace matching theflow of the text.Conversations go on for pages, with characters speakingin paragraphs, not sentences of 4 or 5 words.The book is an explorationof the mood and mind of Dodsworth, a retired American industrialist, stillvery much in the prime of his life, who is cajoled into taking his wife onan open-ended trip to Europe.The wife, battling the on-coming middle ageyears, flirts outrageously, and this leads to romantic entanglements. Dodsworth is left to fend for himself, and returns home, where he longs forhis wayward spouse.Returning to Europe, he finds little changed and theyagree to divorce.After fumbling around the contintent, Dodsworth finds awoman to love, but then his wife is dumped by her latest paramour andDodsworh is faced with the choice of returning to his mate of 20 plusyears, or setting out on a new course.You can feel his pain in coming tohis decision.This book is a terrific discourse on the Ugly American aswell as the phony European royalty. Both sides are equally distasteful, butinteresting none-the-less.The only reason I didn't give this book fivestars is that Lewis seems to rush the ending.The resolution comes tooquickly compared to the pace of the rest of the book.It's like the authorthought, "Well, I've got almost 400 pages, so let's wrap it up." By the way, there is a very good movie made of the book featuring WalterHouston.It's available on video and very faithful to the book. ... Read more

Product Description
Classic novel. According to Wikipedia: "Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as their strong characterizations of modern working women."
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Product Description
Main Street is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920. The story is set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a fictionalized version of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis' hometown.
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Customer Reviews (5)

A great find.
I actually stumbled into this book because of my interest in the art of Grant Wood.I purchased an old special edition of Main Street that was illustrated by Wood.After enjoying the illustrations, I decided that I might as well read the book.Well, that led to Babbitt and Elmer Gantry (with two more on order.)As I looked for Sinclair Lewis books, I saw this biography by Lingeman and was impressed by the great reviews (and the low price of used copies.)I decided to give it a try.In biographies, I mainly read about Victorian scientists but I have enjoyed a few political and artist's bio's. I did not know what I was in for with this incredibly interesting 554 page story of one of the most interesting people I can imagine.Lingeman is a master who combines an incredible amount of research with a writing style that will make you feel as if you are reading a page-turner of a novel.If you have read this far without buying the book of course you are interested in Sinclair Lewis so go ahead, buy the book, and enjoy it.

Justice
Schorer's 1961 biography of Lewis, while well researched, came off as particularly mean-spirited. I could never understand why a biographer would take on the huge task ofan exhaustive biography when they seem to distain it's subject so much.
Finally Mr. Lingeman has given us a more even handed look at one of America's most neglected authors. Perhaps it was the great popularity of Lewis during the 1920's that brought about a more recent reaction against him but it seems that the time is ripe for another look at this most American of American authors and the Lingeman book makes that clear. This biography is clearly as in depth as Schorer's but, fortunately, does not have some strange axe to grind. Besides, the life of Sinclair Lewis makes for some interesting reading when it is put forth honestly.

Interesting and enjoyable
Okay, I haven't read Mark Schorer's earlier biography, but I have read a number of other critical works about Lewis over the years, and more than half of Lewis' twenty-odd novels.

I found this book fascinating and insightful, and I was moved by Lingeman's final argument - that the time is ripe for a rediscovery of Lewis, that the "license to consider Lewis an irrelevant hack" that Schorer's book had conferred on the academic world is expired. I think it's criminal that Lewis is hardly even read in colleges today, while Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc., are still read and discussed in detail. (Nothing against these great writers, all of whom I've read extensively, but Lewis was there first and made all their paths to brilliance easier.)

As long as America is still loaded with familiar George Babbitts, Elmer Gantrys, Sam Dodsworths, Carol Kennicotts, etc., Lewis will be a classic (if not THE classic) American novelist. And Lingeman's biography presents a revealing picture of the unique, angry, ultimately lonely man behind these characters.

After Schorer
As one of a diminishing number of whole-hearted Lewis enthusiasts in America, having read all of Lewis's novels except *Hike and the Aeroplane,* I have to say that Mark Schorer's biography of 1961 remains the standard. Lingeman does fill in details Schorer wouldn't or couldn't and adds some tangential specifics for which devotees such as I can be grateful. A meeting between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lewis in 1922 is sketched in (but how does Lingeman know what they talked about after they closeted themselves with a bottle of gin?); we know more about (say) the circumstances surrounding Lewis's researches for *Gideon Planish,* and Lingeman gets down to the brief nitty-gritty of Lewis's sexual performance, but he has no fresh overall understanding, nor are his specifics brought into new focus, or any special focus. Instead, he builds upon Schorer's essential claim: Lewis's limitations and strengths as a writer are his commitment to surface; his refusal to look into himself comes from the painful and constricting boyhood that stunted the writer even as it enabled him.

I'd nominate Schorer's biography as a great one, qualifying my appraisal only by a parodying Hemingway on Gilbert Seldes: "It could only have been better if Sinclair Lewis had been better." The figure in the carpet, the consistent understanding that ties a book together, is vividly present on every page of Schorer. And unlike Lingeman, Schorer could talk with Lewis's two wives, plus Claude and Michael Lewis, Harry Maule, and Bennett Cerf; his account of Lewis's horrifying, seedy end in Italy is enlivened by portraits of the dermatologist Vincenzo Lapiccirella, the old servant whose refusal to discuss Lewis's alcoholism Schorer finds "engagingly reticent" (Schorer bristles with savage and delicious irony), and the enigmatic Alexander Manson. Beside Schorer, Lingeman is thin and pale, but if Lewis's fixing of quintessential American types and his sense of humor and sense of outrage appeal, you'll want to read his biography anyway, as I did.

Highly readable, very informative
I had high hopes for this book before I started, and then had the rare pleasure of having those hopes surpassed.In this immensely readable biography, Lingeman brings us the Sinclair Lewis we have always wanted to admire, but perhaps never dared: the flawed, brash, idealistic cynic that put on the page a world as American as he was.Over and over I was struck by how relevent the world of Lewis was, and how like our own it continues to be.

Neither heavily academic, nor breezy and light, this biography does exactly what it is supposed to do -- shines light upon a writer we remember, but never really knew. ... Read more

Product Description
C&C Web Press brings you Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author, Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street. Selection includes original book cover art and active table of contents

Excerpt:

"His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep—millions and millions of them." She darted on." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Unexpected pulp from a literary author
When it comes to sterling examples of American literature, students of Lewis's work would be better off with his other work. But as a good, old-fashioned pulp thriller, Mantrap almost excels.

The book is essentially a story of a man reclaiming his (sweaty) (bare-chested) masculinity. The protagonist is Ralph Prescott, a middle-aged New York lawyer on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Although a fiery lion in the courtroom (supposedly), Prescott is shy - dominated by his mother, bullied by his friends, and generally at the mercy of salesmen, porters, hotel clerks and everyone else around him.

In a fit of madness, Prescott agrees to go travelling in the Canadian wilderness with one of his New York acquaintances, a blustering windbag named Wes Woodbury. The perfect portrayal of the armchair expert, Woodbury steals every scene. Under Woodbury's exhausting tutelage, Prescott's vacation quickly degenerates into a farce.


Throughout these initial weeks of holiday, Prescott tries to grow into the picture-perfect rugged man, but Woodbury keeps knocking his feet out from under him. Woodbury mocks Prescott when he tries to 'man up'. Woodbury equally humiliates Prescott when he tries to relax and enjoy himself, leaving Prescott completely emotionally adrift.

Into this mix comes Joe Easter. A true rugged manly-man, Easter runs a one-man trading company. Canoeing up and down Lewis's mythical wilderness, Easter is the picture of quiet, self-controlled masculinity - in contrast to the vocal (and inept) Woodbury. Prescott abandons Woodbury and follows Easter further into the Canadian outback - to Mantrap - an isolated town populated by a half-dozen white folk and a few hundred irritable Cree natives.

From there (about halfway through this short book), things pick up pace dramatically. Easter introduces Prescott to his wife, a foxy ex-manicurist named Alverna, and the small host of trappers, alcoholics and other scruffy types that make up Mantrap society. Despite his manly-man-manliness, Easter has some problems with his wife. A flighty, big city girl, she's miserable in Mantrap, and shows it by carrying on with between 20-40% of the white, male population. This percentage rises as Prescott, despite his best efforts to be a gentleman, is also ensnared.

The climactic chapters involve forest fires, dramatic gun-point confrontations and even a few carefully-alluded-to naughty scenes. At points, Mantrap skirts very close to being a lurid Gold Medal paperback and it is never closer than during the breathless sprints through a burning forest.

As with all of his books, however thin the plot, Lewis's characters are so wonderfully written that you'd happily follow them on shopping trips around the mall. In fact, Prescott's shopping trips are some of the best moments in Mantrap. Prescott, as a protagonist, is a bit pathetic, but he's self-aware, conflicted, and generally tries to do the right thing. So no matter how weak he is, the reader sticks with him and cheers him on. Some of the more minor characters - especially Mantrap's anemic missionary and his carnivorous wife - are laugh-out-loud hilarious - and Woodbury, as mentioned, is a scene-stealer.

As real literature, Mantrap does a good impression of being pulp. A few more lascivious ladies and a little less introspection, and Lewis would've had himself a beautiful bit of genre fiction.

Lose your New York stress in Canada North of Latitude 53.
In 1924 Sinclair Lewis and his physician brother Claude wangled an invitation from the Canadian government to take part in an annual Treaty Trip, i.e., visiting Cree, Chippewa and other Indian tribes to pay each member $5 to console them for having taken away their lands. Sinclair lasted only a month away from his booze but his brother continued on as planned and his diary, later excerpted and published, plus Sinclair's own recollections proved to be the only research necessary when time came to dash off MANTRAP.

Sinclair Lewis, as he had for the American Midwest, in MANTRAP created a fictitious swathe of northern Canada populating it with non-existent rivers and lakes, some named after real ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is the mid 1920s. Ralph Prescott, 40 year old bachelor and mama's boy, (but he pulls in $40,000/year as a lawyer in New York City) is persuaded by E. Wesson Woodbury, Babbitty executive of a stockings company,member of the same Westchester County golf club as Ralph, to join him for several weeks in summer roughing it in northern Canada. They will paddle canoes, portage their gear overland, fish, hunt, meet Indians and fur trappers and live the the simple, rugged life of the great outdoors.

Prescott made the trip because he was working long hours for no good reason and under self-imposed stress. Once on the trail and in the canoes, however, he came to detest the bullying, self-important Wes Woodbury, who exults in simply being north of latitude 53. There arrives at one of their camping spots (unknown to all, a 1587 missionary foundation) 46 year old Canadian fur trader Joe Easter. Joe owns a store at Mantrap Landing on Lac Qui Reve. Ralph soon regards Joe as a true friend and begs him to take him away from Wes Woodbury. Joe does.

As their canoe heads toward Mantrap Landing, Joe tells of a visit last year to Minneapolis where he met and married a spunky manicurist, Alverna, and brought her to live with him in the wilds. Alverna is a famous flirt and Ralph is soon madly in love with her. To break away from undignified temptation, he pushes off in a canoe with a guide to find his original host, Woodbury, about whom he feels increasingly guilty. But Alverna runs away from Joe and persuades Ralph to take her with him back to civilization. Their Indian guide steals their canoe and abandons the lovers just before a vengeful Joe Easter catches up with them and massive forest fires almost engulf all three. The men renew their friendship and Alverna asserts her independence and determination to return to the USA and live her own life, no matter how ditzy that life seems to others. Ralph intends to take Joe to New York and make him a city man. At the station in Winnipeg Alverna's two male admirers put her on a train for Minneapolis. But Joe refuses to travel on to New York with Ralph. End of story. As literature: an easy, pleasant, undemanding read worth perhaps TWO STARS * *.

There are, fortunately, also other reasons to read MANTRAP.

First, Sinclair Lewis gives a feel for Canada's wilderness regions: riding in a caboose, in steamboats and overnighting in cheap, dirty hotels. Adding to the backdrop are RC Mounted Police, canoes, fur traders and more. We go inside a Cree encampment with "Indian men magnificently doing nothing, thinking nothing and wanting nothing" (Ch. Six). There is fishing. There are dogs and the Northern Lights. All are described as well and lovingly as Sinclair Lewis always describes the glittering surface of things.

Next, speaking to us in the year 2005, there is the theme of "stress management." Off to the wilds of Canada! Pack up your troubles and lose them tramping The Long Trail! In the end, the sheltered city slicker, Ralph Prescott shows true grit. When crisis comes, he somewhat implausibly surmounts all manner of primitive challenges and returns refreshed and in triumph to the big city.

Note also scattered religious references: Wes Woodbury made what he is by "the sanctity of salesmanship" (Ch. Eight). How, we are invited to wonder,did fur trader Joe Easter handle prayer, "alone for day after day on the winter trails -- prayer and the hand of Omnipotence in the wilds?" (Ch. Nine).

There you have MANTRAP.

-OOO- ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Ann Vickers
I enjoyed the book very much.The condition of the book was excellent and the delivery fast.

Classic Lewis
A good book not only in terms of characterization (Lewis's forte) but also in illuminating select issues of the time (1900s-1930s): women's suffrage, prison reform and the reality of "vice."

One of Ann/Lewis's strongest achievements is the argument that the nature of prisons essentially exacerbates the crime problem.Ann learns that due to ill-trained wardens/guards and poor conditions "Prison makes the man who enjoyed beating fellow drunks in a barroom come out wanting to kill a policeman" (272).However, like in many of Lewis's novels, a solution is presented.Once a prison superintendent herself Ann preaches the virtues of better trained and better paid employees, cleaner and more humane conditions and an extended parole program.While at times Ann's ultimate destiny feels a bit unrealistic, overall, a solid portrait is painted of possibilities of the New Woman of the early twentieth century.

"I am mine own woman, well at ease."
This spicy novel (some called it sordid) is about an independent-minded woman from the rural Midwest who goes east to college, fights for woman's suffrage, and then becomes the head of an "industrial home" (prison), while at the same time falling in love with the wrong men, marrying and divorcing, having an abortion and then a child by another man out of wedlock, feeling lonely and inadequate, and suffering all the difficulties a modern (early twentieth century) woman in a whirlwind position might face. His views of Ann's sexual behavior - that sex is a positive force even outside of marriage and woman need and enjoy it as much as men - were considered quite forward at the time (some said scandalous). Indeed, the novel ends with Ann living openly with a man while both are still married to others awaiting their divorces, and Lewis depicts her as a fulfilled woman ("This is a new age," she declares). Disappointing is Lewis's refusal to take a position or monitor any of this so that we get the feeling by the end he believes anything goes, that all behavior is justified simply by doing it - which is interesting seeing that much of the novel involves prison reform as well. Yet despite all this "advancement" in sexual mores, it's in this novel that Lewis expresses a conservative bent for the first time (to be magnified greatly in the years to come): he satirizes the radical movement and even thinks the Depression a good thing because it reminds people how "noble" poverty is. So the messages become confusing and confused: unrestricted sex is good, but so are far more constraining elements in society. Coming right after DODSWORTH, this book marks a decided step downward in quality for Lewis, a downhill trend that would continue with each succeeding novel.

When America writes books, she sounds like Sinclair Lewis
You are Ann Vickers "of Waubanakee, Illinois, a little south of the center of the state" ( Ch 1, p. 7). You are 17 years old. Your mother died when you were ten. You are an only child. Your father was local school superintendent. But he died a year ago leaving you a legacy of $1,000. What do you do next?

You draw on your father's and Waubanakee's values and walk with open eyes into the ripening American world ahead from 1907 to 1933. You wait tables to put yourself through Point Royal College for Women in Connecticut. You grow through the amorous advances of a lesbian roommate and a playboy male professor. You study nursing. You stuff envelopes for years so that American women can vote. You go to jail for the cause and later become an expert on women's prisons. You write a learned book and are a popular national columnist. You have made love to three men over the decades, had one abortion greatly regretted, and after age 40 joyfully birthed a son whose father may either be your cloying husband or a charming rogue who sits on the New York State supreme court until he is convicted of being on the take and sentenced to six years in jail. When the judge is pardoned by the Governor (FDR?) after only a year behind bars, you, he and your son plan to defy convention and make a life together.

You are the same Ann Vickers, onetime tomboy of Waubanakee, onetime devotee of the YWCA and Presbyterian Sunday School. You have taken things as they came your way, made your choices and lived with them. And you were written up in a novel by Sinclair Lewis which I defy a reader in 2005 to put down prematurely.

Themes in the novel to be pondered:

--A mother is persuaded by a professor of obstetrics to have an abortion she does not want and who dreams ever after of her "murdered" girl "Pride." A mother who will never murder Pride again and who knows that "coming children" have rights.

--A feminist who never despises men utterly. Most males are taken to be "solid, stolid, unpicturesque citizens who liked breakfast, went to their offices or shops or factories at seven or eight or nine, admired sports connected with the rapid propulsion of small balls ... quarreled with their wives and nagged their children yet were fond of them and for them chased prosperity..." ( Ch. 21, p. 256)

--A married liberal woman goes to parties and hears so much TALK in which people per Roget's Thesaurus "cry, roar, shout, bawl, halloo, whoop, yell, bellow, howl, scream, screech, screak, shriek, shrill, squeak ... yawp, vociferate ... rend the air..." (Ch. 35, p. 421f)

--Ann Vickers squeezes her lover's wife's hand when the judge is sentenced to jail. This is not the first novel in which Sinclair Lewis puts two women with claims on the same man face to face.

--America came of age in the early and middle lifetime of Ann Vickers. What a time! "Hijackers murdering bootleggers. ... Aviators crashing on cottages and burning up old ladies in them. Babies kidnaped and murdered. ... Methodist bishops accused of stock-gambling and rigging elections. ... Five-year-old boys in nice suburbs playing gangster and killing three-year-old boys. ... A skinny little Hindu that drinks only goat's milk baffling the whole British Empire. ... A nation of one hundred and twenty million people letting a few fanatics turn it from beer to poison gin." (Ch. 46, p. 541f)

See if you can resist temptation to read and love ANN VICKERS.

-OOO-

Missing pages, uneven story=lesser Lewis novel
It's sort of amusing that I decided to read Sinclair Lewis's "Ann Vickers" considering the only other novel I have read from America's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was "Babbitt," and that one a few years ago. I couldn't tell you why I chose to read this 1933 novel rather than "Main Street," "Arrowsmith," "Elmer Gantry," or even "Kingsblood Royal." Any one of these four books would be the logical choice after reading "Babbitt." I'm nothing if I'm not contrary to people's expectations, so when I saw this book on the shelf at the library I snatched it up without a second thought and headed home to read it. The book, even at 560 pages, doesn't take that long to read as the font is large and the pages small. Nonetheless, it took me four days to get through the novel largely due to the outdated lingo and the uneven quality of the book. There are several reasons why you haven't heard of "Ann Vickers" before now, one of them being that moving through certain sections of the book feels like serving a ten-year sentence of hard labor at the local penitentiary. Overall, though, Lewis's scathing treatise on radical politics and feminism in the first third of the twentieth century is worth the effort.

Lewis follows the titular character from her earliest years as a resident of Waubanakee, Illinois to her emergence as a major reformer on the East Coast. Right from the start, we get the idea that Ann is different from the other little boys and girls. The only child of a college professor, Ann's social position is one of high standing and moderate wealth. Nonetheless, she soon falls under the spell of a fiery socialist German immigrant named Klebs. By the time Ann goes to college, she's well on the way to becoming a true extremist. She drops out of the Y.W.C.A. after learning to reject Christianity with the help of a radical professor. Vickers forms a socialist organization on campus, embarks on a forbidden relationship with a faculty member, and earns a decidedly unsavory reputation amongst her fellow students. After graduating, she joins the suffrage movement, an activity that requires her to deliver oratories on street corners, go to jail for organizing protests, and hobnob with prominent personalities. Vickers, like most leftist radicals, never stays with a single cause for long. After several stints as assistant superintendents at homes that teach the urban poor and new immigrants life skills, she sets out to work as a prison reformer. The best part of the book details Ann's struggles in a southern prison, where she battles unsanitary conditions, lackadaisical treatment of prisoners, capital punishment, and corruption.

Lewis is very careful to examine all aspects of his character's life. "Ann Vickers" constantly looks behind the rhetoric and politics in an effort to capture the emotional aspects of womanhood. Just because Ann is a radical doesn't mean she's cold to the idea of men. In fact, she has several relationships throughout her life, from a soldier during the First World War named Lafe Resnick to fellow radical Russell Spaulding to a corrupt New York judge named Barney Dolphin. Vickers's experiences with abortion, infidelity, and promiscuity fuel much of the narrative drive of the novel. Her experiences also cool her radical fire so that by the end of the book she's a determined liberal living out of wedlock with a disgraced member of the system. There's a great line at the end of the book where Lewis describes Ann as the "Captive Woman, the Free Woman, the Great Woman, the Feminist Woman, the Domestic Woman, the Passionate Woman, the Cosmopolitan Woman, the Village Woman-the Woman." In short, although he often disagrees with the hypocrisy of Ann and her methods, he does believe that conditions in America were changing enough that a female could now realize all aspects of her personality in both the private and public spheres.

The problems of the book are many. First, I've always believed I should support my state university's publishing house, but this University of Nebraska Press edition is an embarrassment. From pages 371 to 394, half of the pages are blank. Yep, someone let a Sinclair Lewis novel go to bookstore shelves without correcting this completely unacceptable blunder. Even worse, the missing pages start up during the best part of the story, when Ann Vickers works in the southern prison. A primal scream is in order here, but I'm hoping this mistake is specific to one copy and not to the entire run. Second, and more in tune to the actual novel, the first 100 pages of the story aren't very interesting. Vickers's childhood and college days reek of boredom. Only when the character heads out into the larger world and starts mixing it up does the book start to soar. Third, I often thought Ann an unpleasant character, especially when her marital machinations emerge towards the end of the story.

I think this last point, Ann's adultery, upsets me because I'm male. It's an unfair accusation for me to make, though, because men routinely leave their girlfriends and wives for other women in exactly the same way Vickers does. In any event, it's another example of what Lewis tries to say with the novel, that women now have the freedom to live their lives as they see fit. Ultimately, would I recommend "Ann Vickers"? I don't know. I think "Babbitt" light years ahead of this effort. I do believe "Ann Vickers" doesn't receive attention from today's leftist literati because Lewis viciously skewers the far left on nearly every page. Give it a shot if you're a Lewis fan or a moderate conservative who likes to see the leftist fringe occasionally take it on the chin. ... Read more

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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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THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes--they seemed--for laughter and tranquillity.

Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leaped into the glare.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built--it seemed--for giants.



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Elmer Gantry is one of the Sinclair Lewis’s most famous novels. Bringing some notoriety in its day it is a vicious satire of preachers and those they fool. Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis’s satire is how easily people believe what they want to believe.
Perhaps nowadays it is better known for the film of the same name which starred Burt Lancaster and won three Academy Awards. However the book is much more biting than the film and provides a fascinating picture both of the man and the times he would have lived in.
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Amusing and tragic by turn, Sinclair Lewis's classic novel is a biting satire of middle-American values whose title has entered the language as a byword for smug complacency, conformity, and materialism, and whose suburban targets are still much in evidence. A successful real estate agent, George F. Babbitt is a member of all the right clubs, and unquestioningly shares the same aspirations and ideas as his friends and fellow Boosters. Yet even Babbitt dreams of romance and escape, and when his best friend does something to throw his world upside down, he rebels, and tries to find fulfillment in romantic adventures and liberal thinking.Hilarious and poignant, Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions.In his introduction and notes Gordon Hutner explores the novel's historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. The book also features an up-to-date bibliography and explanatory notes that document and gloss the rich social history of the period. ... Read more

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Novel by Sinclair Lewis. 1937 Text Edition: First 448 pages are the complete novel. In addition, novel is followed by 18 pages of "Suggestions for Study," including questions on each chapter, etc. Red boards with black lettering. ... Read more

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A GRAND HOTEL NOVEL FOR "BOY SCOUTS AND ROTARIANS"
Sinclair Lewis may have written more about "service" and the art of being useful to others than any other American novelist. Sometimes he praisesaltruistic service. More often he skewers hypocritical politeness and feigned kindness as mere marketing ploys to sell inferior products. His 1934 novel about hotels and hotel management, WORK OF ART, is especially heavy on attention to service.

In WORK OF ART three generations of the Weagle family grow up in and work for boarding houses, inns and hotels. Focus is on two brothers, Myron and Ora, of the second generation. Poetic, ethereal Ora could not wait to escape hotel drudgery, though never too proud to ask plodding Myron for money.

As Myron thought, learned and managed a steady climb to national respect within the expanding world of early 20th Century hotel managers, he was always skeptical when praised for "creativity" at Rotary Club luncheons and Chamber of Commerce dinners. He dreamed minutely of the shape of his perfect inn or dream hotel: its napkins, its menus, its front desks, its coddling of guests. Yet he never quite pulled off perfection.

Myron argued with younger brother Ora about whether it was even possible to combine money making with administering institutions. "Maybe there were business men, and successful ones, who were not money grubbers, but creators, he suggested" (Ch.4). Myron tried hard to combine these two talents, but never quite succeeded. If anyone could pull this combination off, it was the much admired traveling salesman, J. Hector Warlock whom Myron began noticing when only 15 while front desking the family owned American Hotel in Black Thread, Connecticut. Warlock "could sell fleece-lined overshoes in hell! (Ch. 4) Over time he convinced Myron that all trades evolve: barbering becomes surgery. Taverns become inns, become hotels and someday most people will live in hotels instead of houses.

Young Myron learned the service dimension of just being friendly from American Hotel bartender Jock McCreedy. Bartenders held democratic court in pre-Prohibition America. Myron Weagle learned as wellto manage inebriated businessmen and "lonely and love-starved women" (Ch. 9) living in hotels. By 1904 theoreticians of hotel management were already agreed that a hotel staffer owed guests "a metaphysical blessing called 'Service'; that he should be at once the Little Brother and the Kind Uncle of everyone who registered -- call them by name ... and ask them tenderly about the Folks, illnesses, weather, and business conditions Back Home" (Ch. 11). But Myron never excelled in "oozing unfelt cordiality."

Myron came to admire the great hotels as excelling even churches, universities, forts and hospitals for knowing "the heart and blood circulation of history" (Ch. 11). He met and liked Luciano Mora, whose family had kept six generations of inns and hotels in Naples. Together they fanatically glorified "innkeeping as veritably an art" (Ch. 15). Hotel management was far more than just an interesting way to make a living.

COMMENT: In February 1905 the Rotary Club of Chicago was created, launching the entire service club movement. In this centennial year 2005 Rotarians are learning that it was in 1934's WORK OF ART that a prissy school superintendent in Black Thread, Connecticut made a much quoted linkage between "two great spiritual awakenings": Boy Scoutism and Rotarianism: "a Boy Scout is a young Rotarian, and every Rotarian is a Boy Scout in long trousers!" (Ch. 17)

Mryon rose. Myron fell. Myron bounced back. In 1932, towards novel's end, in his early 50s with his management career in shreds, he used his last savings for a hot summer drive with family to tiny Lemuel, Kansas. Things looked bleak and dull but Myron's "Rotarian enthusiasm," comic though it was, propelled him on.In Kansas Myron built and then transformed The Commercial Hotel. But minor magic came as well. For the first time ever, his wife Effie May became "a hotelman's wife" as had Myron's mother before her. Teen age son Luke Weagle, age 16 in 1933, also opted for a future in hoteling and warmed his father by suggesting a great developmentsite for a new approach to America's rising world of automobile tourists, whose idea of a vacation was simply to drive all over the place for the sheer fun of driving on passable roads.

Sinclair Lewis, as always, tells a great yarn: this time about the ups and downs in a rising America's unending pursuit of craftsmanship and material success.

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The career of an hotelman at the begining of the century
This is an interesting book I have not read in a long time about a self made hotelman.Sinclair Lewis's descriptions of large hotels with big kitchens and numerous staff are most interesting in their accuracy. ... Read more

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A selection of critical essays on Lewis's novel scrutinizing the medical profession. ... Read more

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The most beloved works of Sinclair Lewis in one collection. This edition includes an active table of contents. This edition includes:

Babbitt
Main Street
The Trail of the Hawk

If you like this book make sure and check out other books in the "Greatest Hits Series." ... Read more