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 (Joe Queenan, on Parents Who 'Behave Like Bozos' at Their Kids’ Games)

“As the years have passed, I find myself fondly recalling the experience of watching other parents behave like bozos. I miss hearing the refs accused of gross miscarriages of justice, of being on the underworld payroll, of lacking even a scintilla of basic human decency. I miss getting to stand on the sidelines watching other parents drench the ground with tears just because the ump called leaden-footed Bree out at the plate. Which she forgot to tag anyway.”—American satirist and critic Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: A Tribute to the Inane Dramas of Sideline Parents,” The Wall Street Journal, June 8-9, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Peace, Love and Justice)

“This is where love comes in — love of God and love of neighbor — and this is where justice comes in as well. Augustine's alternative definition [of the commonwealth] starts with love. ‘A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.’ It ‘follows that to observe the character of a particular people, we must examine the objects of its love. No single man can create a commonwealth. There is no ur-founder, no great bringer of order. It begins in ties of fellowship, in households, clans and tribes, in earthly love and its many discontents. And it begins in an ontology of peace, not war.”—American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1996)

Quote of the Day (Tana French, on Irish Speech as a Product of Colonialism)

“Ireland is a postcolonial country and that makes a huge, huge difference to the entire mentality. What I was talking about just now where people are quite oblique about communicating anything —especially anything with any heavy emotional charge—I think that has a certain amount of post-colonial resonance, where if you've spent centuries culturally in a position where anything that you say could in fact have huge consequences and be used by an occupying power, an oppressor, it makes you quite cautious about what you say and what you say openly….We've got a weird relationship with authority over here where we don't like to defy it openly. We don't like to stand up against it, but we really like finding clever ways around it. So, it makes for an interesting combination where you can see these people who have been the subject of really brutal penal laws and oppression like valuing the skill of finding a clever way to outward authority. But now it's changed because the people who are in authority, the government, are in fact elected by the Irish. They are the Irish. And yet you still have this mentality that you'll get some politician who took a ton of bribes or something and there's a slight undercurrent of ‘fair play to him--stuck it to the man.’  [Now,] it's like, dude, you are the man. We are the man. What do you mean we stuck it to the man? But there's still that respect for outwitting authority underlying.”—American-born Irish mystery novelist Tana French, in conversation with Anna Kusmer, Boston Globe, “Say More” podcast, “Tana French’s Endless Fascination with the Irish,” aired Apr. 9, 2026

Quote of the Day (Raphael Warnock, on the Supreme Court’s ‘Jim Crow in New Clothes’)

“The Supreme Court did the democracy a terrible disservice today….These efforts to effectively disenfranchise black voters have always, even during the dark days of the Jim Crow era, claimed to be race-neutral….By the time you had the Voting Rights Act, black people theoretically had a right to vote for 100 years, when the 15^th Amendment was passed. But through literacy tests, through grandfather clauses, through poll taxes, they effectively disenfranchised black voters. This is just the 21^st century version. This is Jim Crow in new clothes. This Supreme Court is an activist court. They did us a terrible disservice several years ago in the Shelby v. Holder decision.  And Justice [John] Roberts opined back then that this is not necessary. Well, what have we seen since then? Since then, the racial voter turnout gap has increased all over the country. I think it’s important for me to stress that, because I’m sitting here and people say, ‘You got the first black Senator from Georgia, you have a black President.’ Here is the reality: the racial turnout gap since Shelby v. Holder [in] 2013 has widened all over the country. And in the South, in the states that required pre-clearance [under the Voting Rights Act] because of a history of discrimination, that gap has grown twice as fast. We’re all entitled to our own opinion. We’re not entitled to our own facts, and the numbers and the facts bear it out. Today was one more assault. Shelby says you can engage in disenfranchisement practices, which has increased the gap in voter turnout. Today’s decision says that even when non-white voters show up in robust numbers, we’re giving you permission to play with the lines, because that’s all gerrymandering is. So that even as they show up, they will not have the kind of representation that their voice suggests they ought to have. And the proof is in the pudding. They are busy right now, supercharging redistricting. There are people in my state, even though early voting has already begun, some are already saying, ‘We ought to do something about that. We ought to redraw the maps.’”—U.S. Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), on the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais et. al. decision on voting rights, on “The Briefing With Jen Psaki,” MS-Now, original air date Apr. 29, 2026

Senator Warnock has concisely summarized the voting-rights legislative history that too many people don't know, as well as effectively rebutted Justice Samuel Alito’s contention in Louisiana v. Callais et. al. that the remedies dictated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are no longer needed.

In the short term, the Roberts Court has offered not guidance but disorder for the upcoming midterm elections, okaying a blatant gerrymandering attempt after previously ruling that these were "political decisions" beyond the reach of the federal judiciary.

In the long term, though, the Alito-penned decision will be regarded with the same disdain and revulsion as the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Reconstruction Era civil-rights legislation to which Senator Warnock refers.

This ruling follows a pattern in which the conservative majority has only departed, in one notable instance—tariffs—from what the Trump Administration has desired.

Ironically, by clearing a path for chaos and lawlessness by the President and his MAGA minions at the federal and state levels, the court (or what a friend of mine calls “The Extreme Court”) has only brought their own reasoning into disrepute and consigned themselves into an irrelevance that would have dismayed the great Chief Justice John Marshall two centuries ago.

(The image that accompanies this post—the Rev. Warnock’s official Senate photo—was taken on Feb. 3, 2021, by Rebecca Hammel of the U.S. Senate Photographic Studio.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,’ With a Typical Executive Disclaimer of Responsibility)

J. B. Biggley [played by Rudy Vallee, on the left with Robert Morse]: “I realize that I'm the president of this company, the man that's responsible for everything that goes on here. So, I want to state, right now, that anything that happened is not my fault.”— How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), based on the novel by Shepherd Mead, adapted into a Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical with book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, movie written and directed by David Swift

For years, I’ve heard many politicians—I won’t say from which party—express their belief that government should be “run more like a business.” I wonder if the business they have in mind is J.B. Biggley’s World Wide Wicket Company?

Well, I’ll tell you: that statement of his that I’ve highlighted here is, for all intents and purposes, the continued default option for corporate executives who run into trouble, whether in the form of product or service failure, a disastrous earnings report, even fraud or misconduct. Their most common method for avoiding responsibility is to blame a predecessor.

Now that I think of it, a politician I can think of immediately has also taken this very course.

Photo of the Day: Shark River, Avon-by-the-Sea, NJ

Yesterday an event took me down to an area that, despite my lifelong residence in the state, I have rarely gone to in recent years: the Jersey Shore. As soon as I stepped out of my car in the parking lot next to the Marina Building, I was enthralled by this setting, with the bridge leading to Belmar off to the right, so I took this picture.

The Shark River is one of three bodies of water, along with Sylvan Lake and the Atlantic Ocean, that surrounds Avon-by-the-Sea. It was a quiet late afternoon when I got down there, so I missed the parade of boats that often go by. But I gloried in the view and the crisp air of this seaside community.

Running eleven miles, the Shark River is bordered by Avon-by-the-Sea, Neptune City, Neptune Township, Wall Township and Belmar Borough. Despite its approximately 800 acres of shellfish growing waters, much of the river is classified “Restricted “by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Oh, yes: wondering about sharks? Turns out none is present in these waters. So why this name? Some possible theories:

*Maybe the name dates from the mid-1800s, when a shark might have been in the river;

*Maybe it derives from the “low-grade” fishing huts or shacks around in the late 1700s, with “shark” being a twisted form of  “Shirk” or “Shack”; or

*Maybe it comes from because upstream in Shark River Park can be found shark teeth left in fossil from the Cretaceous geologic period.

For an interesting oral history of the Avon River (including bootlegging that went on during Prohibition), see this interview with longtime area resident Ray Dodd, recorded and posted online by his son Charlie after his death.