“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.
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