Flashback, May 1926: Miffed Sinclair Lewis Nixes Pulitzer for ‘Arrowsmith’

After bypassing Sinclair Lewis twice in the past half-dozen years, the Pulitzer Prize board –whether in recognition of present merit or compensation for past mistakes—awarded him the fiction prize for Arrowsmith in early May 1926.

Whether out of genuine principle or annoyance over his Main Street being passed over in 1920 for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or, in 1922, his Babbitt for Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Lewis rejected the citation. It may have been the most resounding rebuke of a cultural institution before George C. Scott and Marlon Brando refused to accept their Best Actor Oscars in the early 1970s.

Privately, Lewis told publisher Alfred Harcourt that he intended to turn it down because of “the Main Street burglary.” While some observers suspected peevishness on his part, Lewis gave a more high-minded public justification.

The terms of the Pulitzer called for the award to go to work that represented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood”—precisely the grounds on which Main Street and Babbitt, with their withering satire, had been bypassed before.

Those terms, Lewis wrote in his letter of rejection, “would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

With three bestselling, highly acclaimed novels to his credit, Lewis wielded a great deal of credibility, particularly when he framed his rejection in the context of his also declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His refusal of the Pulitzer and the $1,000 that went with it earned front-page notice in The New York Times.

As there always are in such cases, cynics wondered if there was more to the situation than Lewis explained, and their case was bolstered four years later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature—particularly because, in turning down the Pulitzer, he had stated that “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous.” [emphasis added]

Arrowsmith may have been the most universally appealing of Lewis’ novels to this point, featuring a protagonist who, though flawed, was an idealistic, science-oriented doctor dedicated wholly to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

While not dispensing with the author’s gift for satire (in this case, targeting medical quackery, public-health bureaucrats, and doctors who shamelessly pursuit financial success at the expense of patients), it gave readers a chance to admire a major character unreservedly.

As the son and brother of doctors, Lewis came by his interest in the medical profession naturally. But what many critics and ordinary readers may not have realized at the time is that the career of Martin Arrowsmith drew on Lewis’ recent friendship with 35-year-old microbiologist and pathologist Paul De Kruif—one that became so close that it evolved into a genuine working collaboration.

As James Tobin explains in this blog post, Lewis even suggested to De Kruif that he be listed as co-author, with the two splitting royalties 50-50. The doctor, as much stunned by the generous offer as aware that Lewis’ name constituted the proposed project’s main selling point, thought that the split should be 75% to 25% in Lewis’ favor.

In the end, either Lewis’s publisher or the author himself rejected the microbiologist’s request for a single line on the title page: “In collaboration with Paul De Kruif.”

Instead, Lewis set out his debt to De Kruif in a different fashion, acknowledging his help “not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his suggestions in the planning of the fable itself  – for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist.”

In the end, it wasn’t insufficient acknowledgement of his creative input that fractured De Kruif’s relationship with Lewis, but at least several incidents of the latter’s erratic, often alcohol-fueled misbehavior that at last couldn’t be ignored.

Nevertheless, his association with the now-prizing author benefited De Kruif enough that he came to write a bestselling nonfiction account of medicine later that year, Microbe Hunters, launching a second career for him as a popular writer of medical histories, biographies, and public-health advocacy.

After winning the Nobel Prize, as his alcoholism worsened, most critics agreed that the quality of Lewis’ work suffered, and his reputation took a further hit with Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography. But periodically, readers who have returned to the novels written at his peak discover their continuing relevance, and Arrowsmith is no exception.

As I mentioned in this post from late last year, though not read as widely as two other novels published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, it shared with them a searing criticism of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties.

More than a few 21^st-century patients will nod appreciatively at how, in med school, Arrowsmith listens to a professor who extols the value of salesmanship to his students—including the value of convincing patients of the need for dubious small but money-making operations.

They will also detect the early baleful influence of Big Pharma in the Hunziker Company’s harassment of Arrowsmith’s mentor, the German scientist Max Gottlieb, for his reluctance to market an antitoxin he’s developed until he’s absolutely certain of its effectiveness—and, since COVID-19, they will shudder on the enormous pressures and responsibilities felt by Arrowsmith as he battles the outbreak of bubonic plague on an island in the West Indies.

Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on an Evangelist’s Planned Jersey Shore Project)

“The pier was an immense structure, built of cheap knotty pine, painted a hectic red with gold stripes. It was pleasant, however, on hot evenings. Round it ran a promenade out over the water, where once lovers had strolled between acts of the opera, and giving on the promenade were many barnlike doors.

[Evangelist Sister] “Sharon [Falconer] christened it ‘The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle,’ added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs….

“All of Clontar, with its mile of comfortable summer villas and gingerbread hotels, was excited over the tabernacle, and the Chamber of Commerce had announced, ‘We commend to the whole Jersey coast this high-class spiritual feature, the latest addition to the manifold attractions and points of interest at the snappiest of all summer colonies.’

“A choir of two hundred had been coaxed in, and some of them had been persuaded to buy their own robes and mortar boards.

“Near the sand dune against which Sharon and Elmer [Gantry] lolled was the tabernacle, over which the electric cross turned solemnly, throwing its glare now on the rushing surf, now across the bleak sand.

"‘And it's mine!’ Sharon trembled. ‘I've made it! Four thousand seats, and I guess it's the only Christian tabernacle built out over the water!’”—Pulitzer and Nobel Literature prize-winning American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), Elmer Gantry (1927)

I came across this quote after watching on TCM, decades after the first time I saw it, the 1960 film adaptation of Elmer Gantry. (In the attached image, that’s Burt Lancaster as the titular preacher and Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer.)

In the movie, the grand evangelical center that Sharon envisions is built (and then destroyed in a fire) in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. I was all the more surprised, then, to discover that Sinclair Lewis set Sharon’s project in a seaside community in New Jersey. I wondered, given that the novelist conducted extensive interviews and research while writing his fiction, if he had a particular Jersey Shore town in mind.

For help, I turned to Dr. Sally E. Parry, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Illinois State University and Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society. She wrote back that though the novelist did most of his research in the Midwest as he visited churches (especially in Missouri), he did not, to the best of her knowledge, model the tabernacle on a particular place.

Sharon Falconer, she continued, is strongly based on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose ministry was primarily centered in California.  “The novel was also inspired to a certain extent by Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which Lewis admired (Carol Kennicott discusses it in Main Street). Theron Ware is a Methodist preacher who is awakened to a variety of religious beliefs, including some by Sister Soulsby.”

Dr. Parry confirmed one possibility I raised: that Lewis might have learned about some Jersey Shore spots while working as a janitor for six months at Helicon Hall, the novelist Upton Sinclair’s 1906 utopian experiment in Englewood, NJ.

Now that I think of it, locating Sharon’s tabernacle by the shore might have appealed to the novelist in a couple of other ways: it would have testified to the growing national ambitions of her ministry, and this geographic location would have been even more resonant for a structure named after “the Waters of Jordan.”

Whatever the case may be, this novel, like so much of the writer’s other work at the height of his influence on American culture in the 1920s, continues to reverberate a century later.

In the late 1980s, in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, Tom Wolfe highlighted the conclusion of this stinging satire, where Gantry notices “a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted.” Lewis had certainly anticipated the sensational sex scandals that had recently engulfed televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, he observed.

The death this past week of the latter reminded me that Swaggart was involved in another scandal three years after the one that led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God. 

Unfortunately, the immense moral and political sway wielded by today’s mega-church leaders has led them to ignore the lessons of history offered by the Bakker and Swaggart cases, with Robert Morris and Mike Bickle among the recent high-profile preachers who have strayed from the straight and narrow path through sexual misconduct.

I can’t imagine that Sharon Falconer’s “Waters of Jordan” could cleanse the enormous sins they have committed.

Flashback, October 1920: Lewis’ ‘Main Street’ Satirizes Small-Town Life

When Harcourt, Brace & Company published the sixth novel by Sinclair Lewis in late October 1920, it hoped for sales of 25,000. But the novel’s reception by critics and readers exceeded even the publisher’s fondest expectations. Buoyed by widespread attention arising from outrage over its attack on small-town life, Main Street sold 180,000 copies within the first six months of 1921 and narrowly missed being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The novel lifted Lewis—a janitor at Upton Sinclair’s utopian socialist community, Helicon Hall, in Englewood, NJ, 14 years before, and for the past five years author of five novels that, he said, were “dead before the ink was dry”—into the front ranks of American literature. It began a decade that represented his creative zenith, securing for him the Nobel Prize in Literature—the first time that an American had received this honor.

The qualities on display in Main Street—especially, a realistic depiction of everyday life backed by extensive research, and an uncanny “ear” for dialogue—became the hallmarks of Lewis’ style. But much of the attention accorded the novel derived from his willingness to attack a sacred cow—a tendency that made him a favorite of intellectuals and skeptics such as H.L. Mencken but also the bane of more tradition-bound figures such as Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler.

Since the founding of the republic, small-town/rural life had been regarded as an antidote to the multiple evils perceived in cities. In contrast, Lewis—who had loathed his childhood in Sauk Centre, Minn.—depicted fictional Gopher Prairie as a generator of vapidity and conformity. It is entirely too set complacent, provincial, even bigoted to be moved when Carol Kennicott, the idealistic young wife of the town doctor, decides to raise its cultural awareness. Gopher Prairie residents, he noted acidly, were:

“staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word ‘dude’ is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always peddlers or pants-makers.”

The three-judge panel to select the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was so taken with Lewis’ devastating satire that they recommended him for the award. Butler’s reversal of that decision and present the award instead to The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton was greeted with howls of protest (as was the panel’s decision two years later to overlook Lewis again in favor of Willa Cather’s One of Ours).

Contemporary critics are more likely than those of a century ago to praise Wharton’s anatomization of New York’s 1870s aristocracy: Feminist scholarship has opened many eyes to the precarious position of women years ago, and Wharton’s graceful prose style has worn better than Lewis’ blunter presentation.

In the end, much of this reappraisal is ironic: though the social circles examined by Lewis and Wharton could scarcely be more different, they both feature protagonists who, restlessly eyeing their dutiful but dull romantic partners, are easily maneuvered into compromise and defeat by their community. (Wharton herself felt that, in praising her book’s “wholesome” character, Butler had fundamentally her artistic purpose.)

Since the 2016 Presidential campaign, interest has peaked in a dystopian 1935 novel of Lewis’: It Can’t Happen Here.  Already, the novelist’s alcoholism was undermining his creative power. But, for one brief moment, the specter of European-style Fascism being imposed on the U.S. roused Lewis to something like a return to the creative form he enjoyed with Main Street.

Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on a Candidate ‘Actor of Genius’)

“He [populist Presidential candidate—and eventual winner—Buzz Windrip] was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”—Pulitzer- and Nobel Literature Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

This Day in Literary History (William Dean Howells, Near-Forgotten ‘Dean of American Letters,’ Dies)

May 11, 1920-- William Dean Howells, dubbed “Dean of American Letters” for his exploration of multiple genres and his influence as a critic and editor on the nation’s literature, died in his sleep in New York City at age 83.

The prior decade had seen the passing of Howells’ two great but very dissimilar friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. At the peak of his influence and popularity, Howells’ fiction had been ranked alongside theirs as exemplars of a realistic school decidedly at odds with the romantic novels more favored by American publishers in the early post-Civil War period.

But the century since his death has been kinder to the two writers that Howells championed than to the editor-novelist himself. While Twain continues to be studied for introducing native vernacular to American literature and James is celebrated for his pioneering psychological insights into characters’ motivations, Howells is seen as conventional, even something of an old fogy.

Four writers—a novelist and three critics— might be said to have interred Howells’ reputation. The first, biographer Van Wyck Brooks, did not wait even a year before his death before criticizing him (and Twain’s wife Libby) in The Ordeal of Mark Twain for reining in his rude, ribald genius with their own puritanism and prudery. 

H.L. Mencken picked up on this theme, inveighing against Howells, with characteristic invective, for churning out "a long row of uninspired and hollow books" and acting like a “somewhat kittenish old maid."

Many listeners in 1930 might have been mistakenly heard the voice of Mencken in that of the Nobel Literature laureate that year, Sinclair Lewis, who picked up Mencken’s rhetorical tropes and fairly ran with them. The rise of Howells, Lewis charged in his lecture, had represented for American literature “something like a standard, and a very bad standard it was”:

“Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most honest of men, but he had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarsenesses of life.’ In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys, the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the quaintness of the beggars.”

The evisceration of Howells was effectively completed a generation later in 27-year-old Alfred Kazin’s sweeping study of American prose from the 1890s through 1940, On Native Grounds. The opening chapter uses Howell as the central figure against which virtually an entire new genre, the naturalists and their successors: “he was a monumental example of the antiquated nineteenth-century conscience upon which a new order of society had placed an intolerable burden.”

Literary reputation is a fleeting thing—and ironically, even the four men who did so much to take down Howells do not stand up so well as they once did. At the same time, if Howells has not reacquired his once-exalted status, a more respectful tone has crept into evaluations of his work. 

Historian Richard White, for instance, used Howells as a voice to try to make sense of the squalling Industrial Age in his book, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865‒1896. His Howells is less prudish than ambivalent, an observer too thoughtful to miss in his novels and magazine columns the injustices of his time but too perplexed by them all to offer a corrective to them. 

The best way to ensure a writer is read is to make sure he is assigned to students. Though Howells’ most influential novels (from 1875 through 1888) can be found in a two-volume Library of America series, I doubt if more than a few students have gone beyond even one: The Rise of Silas Lapham. But if you have to start somewhere with him, it might as well be here. 

Less buffoonish than Lewis’ George Babbitt, less brutal than Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, Lapham is also more thoroughly recognizable and human. Proud, boastful, eager to maintain his place in society, this businessman lets his greed get the better of him. The “rise” in the title is actually ironic: His realization of his folly and determination to live for others following the collapse of his fortunes produces a moral, rather than financial, elevation.

Quote of the Day (Albert Murray, on the ‘Stress and Strain’ Endured by Heroes)

“Heroism, which like the sword is nothing if not steadfast, is measured in terms of the stress and strain it can endure and the magnitude and complexity of the obstacles it overcomes. Thus difficulties and vicissitudes which beset the potential hero on all sides not only threaten his existence and jeopardize his prospects; they also by bringing out the best in him, serve his purpose. They make it possible for him to make something of himself. Such is the nature of every confrontation in the context of heroic action.” —American literary and jazz critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916-2013), The Hero and the Blues (1973)

Worldwide these past few weeks—and for the foreseeable future here in the U.S.—medical personnel have emerged as the foremost heroes in the battle against the Coronavirus. 

A fictional forebear of this brave group was the title character of Sinclair Lewis’ 1925 novel Arrowsmith, adapted into a movie six years later starring Ronald Colman (pictured here). The climax of the novel and film is this young doctor’s battle against the plague on a fictional Caribbean island.

Lewis’ dogged pursuit of fact—and deeply realistic depiction of his hero’s life—led to the novelist being rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize. Someday, when our current crisis is over, perhaps another author will deliver a similar masterful account of a field that needs desperately to be better understood.

Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on the Sorry State of American Literature in His Time)

“In America most of us - not readers alone but even writers - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues. To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias.”— Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Prize Lecture, Oslo, Norway, December 12, 1930

Novelist Sinclair Lewis, born on this date in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minn., was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. “The American Fear of Literature” that he criticized upon receiving the award in 1930 has changed mightily in recent years. Not only did two countrymen he praised in that address for their refusal to look away from ugliness, Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill, go on to win the same prize, but our bestseller lists—and certainly current syllabi of American literature at colleges and universities across the country—also reflect Americans’ willingness to ponder hard truths about themselves.

Lewis himself has fared less well through the years. His best novels—Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth—were already behind him when he won. He died an alcoholic wreck two decades later, producing work that, most critics believed, declined with each effort, and he was unlucky in death to have received, in Mark Schorer, a deeply unsympathetic biographer.

He is worth more than just a second look, however. At his best, he painted extraordinarily vivid pictures of American life that benefited from his in-depth research. Tom Wolfe has made waves in the past 25 years as much for hailing the critically out-of-favor Lewis as for the realistic novel the latter raised to a high plane. Here, in a 2006 interview at an appearance at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wolfe described Lewis’ painstaking method of collecting information:

“He decided that he wanted to write a novel about the Protestant clergy, which had tremendous power in the 1920s. To prepare for it, he used to fill in for ministers who wanted to take a vacation in the summer and he would give sermons. He would go to Chautauquas. He would go to divinity schools, carrying around his five-by-eight cards, where he would take notes to write Elmer Gantry, which I like the best of all of his books. This was what you did.”

Personally, I also admit to an interest in Lewis because his constant traveling brought him to points where I have been. In his early 20s, for instance, he worked (unhappily) at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair’s utopian community in the East Hill section of my hometown, Englewood, NJ (That building was destroyed in a fire after Lewis departed grumpily.)

Then, a little more than a decade ago, while walking down Minnesota’s famous Summit Avenue, I passed by the William Butler House. Lewis leased the house in 1917 and 1918 while working on two projects: a novel about the late railroad magnate James J. Hill (whose own home was located conveniently down the street) and Hobohemia, a play that enjoyed an 11-week run in New York.

When he left Summit Avenue, Lewis was still two years away from the book that would vault him to the forefront of American letters, Main Street. A man a decade his junior who had grown up in the neighborhood would return here for a short stint to work on This Side of Paradise, which also won him notice in 1920: F. Scott Fitzgerald.