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 21st-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.
