There are many moments when I’m asked why I love American literature. Often, I’m a little confused—but not because I don’t know what I like about. Usually, I name the themes—the American Dream, politics, race, film history, and much more—or something ambiguous like the way of looking or the landscape (or just “style”). That’s not really the issue.
It’s a surprising question to me because “what is American literature?” is a question that American novelists have been facing for a long time. The idea that there is something about American literature that we still find baffling is an interesting one—it means there is something about America we still find hard to pin down. I come from Germany, where I often hear literature lovers talk of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Austen, and Mann—but an American novelist? Not many people have read Faulkner or even Melville. An American author once identified a similar problem: Sinclair Lewis. Nowadays, he’s probably famous for his novel It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian work about a fictional American fascist government in the 1930s. But he did another, probably more important service to his country: Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930. During his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he made a clear statement about the meaning of American Literature:
“I have for the future of American literature every hope and every eager belief. We are coming out of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism. There are young Americans today who are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them.”
At the same time, Lewis is critical of previous American literature and optimistic about the future. The 45-year-old author had already experienced a successful, best-selling career in journalism and writing at that time. But he was a few decades ahead of the great explosion of modernism in American letters—we can assume that in the quote he was referring to authors such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, so he had good reason to be hopeful.
But what was the past Lewis was trying to break from? In the speech, Lewis sarcastically brands American culture as “dull provincialism.” He was a child of the Midwest, and his life story is a very classically American one. There should be enough to say about Sinclair Lewis, yet, every time when I research him or ask scholars, I hear the same thing: he is poorly researched, not really read, nor discussed. But why? And what does he mean for American culture nowadays?
If you read about Sinclair Lewis, you won’t really find a lot of positive or kind words about him. He was a sort of popular intellectual who had a large readership in his days but hasn’t been widely appreciated since. He came from the Midwest—and didn’t like it at all. Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town with around 1,200 inhabitants, in 1885, Lewis was the son of a doctor. As a boy, he was “something of a misfit—ugly, awkward, bookish, and unpopular,” the literature scholar, Morris Dickstein, once dryly observed. He was an outsider, a rebel who was “peculiarly susceptible to radical ideas” while being “unhappy and unloved.” Nowadays, Lewis would probably be that one boy in one of the back corners in the classroom, devoid of “real” talents, with a little acne on his face, isolated, an outsider to the overwhelming mainstream. In German, we have the funny word Taugenichts—a good-for-nothing. That is what his father, “a distant, unbending, and puritanical man,” in Dickstein’s formulation, thought of him. Couldn’t he just behave like a normal boy and stop reading books or going to the prairie?
In his last year in school, Lewis suddenly endeavored hard to get good grades, hoping to flee the sticks and get into a good Eastern college (Yale would be his final destination). In this sense, Lewis’ journey was like that of other American writers from the heartland at that time. Ernest Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and others all left their more benighted birthplaces to find their luck elsewhere, mostly on the East Coast. Lewis escaped from the dullness he perceived in the Midwest, and denounced in his speech, but rather than repressing his memories, he transformed his complex relationship with his home into satirical, socially realistic novels. In 1920, Lewis published his most famous novel on this theme: Main Street. The United States had just left World War I behind and was now facing the so-called Roaring Twenties. Lewis’ novels touched the country’s nerve during this period—they were unforgiving and revealed what America really meant to writers like him. Main Street starts with a pungent, cynical observation:
“This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called ‘Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.’ But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Montana or Ohio, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be in Up York State or in the Carolina hills.”
In other words, Main Street and its story would be the same elsewhere—places like Sauk Centre were like copies of an original that was probably a copy, too. One feels this when reading Main Street: that the novel is about the most common of experiences. So common in fact, that they don’t just speak to the sense of placelessness in America. I grew up in a small village in the German countryside and often wonder about village life and its distinctive idiosyncrasies. Growing up in an environment like that you discover at some point that you already know everything around you—that there isn’t more to explore in cultural terms. And that the fact mom actually raised you like an intellectual kid from the city with access to books makes you lucky and unusual. To me, Main Street is like déjà-vu. When the novel’s protagonist, sociology graduate and librarian Carol Kennicott, moves from St. Paul, Minnesota, to the fictional small town of Gopher Prairie (with her husband, Will, a dry and somewhat boring country doctor) she quickly takes painful notice of the town’s lack of substance and beauty. Optimistic, dynamic, and hopeful she can reform Gopher Prairie, Carol’s efforts do not fall on fertile ground. In book clubs, the Gopher Prairians still prefer to read only the Bible, despite her effort to introduce popular new American authors. For that circle, reading new authors means only learning about their biographies, not engaging with the material and the worlds it opens up.
Lewis deals with a whole host of topics in the novel, from social progress (or standstill), migration, socialism, and gender. In Main Street’s Midwest, the most populous immigrant cultures clash, from Swedish to Germans to Norwegians. He portrays poor farmers, doctors, lawyers, librarians, and more. While Carol seems to find her transcendental inspiration in the prairie, her husband understands her vigor, but he doesn’t know how to respond. The only people who really understand her are Guy Pollack, a lawyer who reads poems, and the atheist and socialist, Miles Bjornstam. In every small town, there are a few people like this, trying to make the place something more unique.
Main Street became an unexpected success. 295,000 copies were sold after one year. Full of joy, Lewis’s publisher, Alfred Harcourt, wrote in a letter on November 18, 1920:
“The book is really selling in New York City. Baker and Taylor take another thousand, which just cleans out the second printing. In fact, we are not filling the entire order at once so as to be sure to have stock until we get the third lot next week.”
Readers went wild, just like the reviewers and university professors. In one of his letters to Harcourt on November 24, 1920, Lewis related that:
“[The American critic] Carl von Doren writes me that he heard a Columbia instructor or professor ‘arguing with a whole gang of men at luncheon that Main Street is the most truthful novel ever written.’”
And even the Midwest, which Lewis so sarcastically caricatured as a cultural backwater, reacted excitedly to the fascinating rise to fame of its homegrown novelist, as Harcourt states:
“Telegram orders this morning show that it is really getting its legs in the Middle West. Too bad they were so slow about it for Christmas business, but it means the sure carry-over to next year.”
Lewis, however, was not the first one who described the American small-town life in his novels. One year after Main Street’s release, the aforementioned Van Doren gave a name to a general movement, a so-called “revolt from the village” that brought authors like Lewis or Cather to light. Before the success of Main Street, Sherwood Anderson had released his short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio, which satirizes the grotesque life of the titular small town’s inhabitants. The mission of these Midwestern writers was not to wax poetic about the pastoral village and its nostalgia anymore. Instead, they were rebels who wanted to satirize their homeland and its sociology. But Lewis was foremost among them. The novelist John W. De Forest had formulated the idea of a “Great American Novel” in 1868. In his opinion, the American novel should focus on “the American soul,” meaning the “ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” So far, there hadn’t been an American novel that had really made it, in his estimation. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe had done their best work in short stories. Having failed both high sales and the critics’ taste, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from 1851 would not earn recognition until the 20th century. With admiration, one critic proudly announced that Lewis’ Main Street finally achieved the status of the Great American Novel.
Beyond his satire of the Midwest, the rebellious Lewis understood the anxieties underlying the outwardly untroubled American life in the 1920s. After Main Street, he wrote a broad range of other novels, such as Babbitt, about the business world, Elmer Gantry about religion, and Arrowsmith, about medical ethics. His political novel It Can’t Happen Here, from 1935, depicts how a populist government could gain power in America. Lewis’ model was Nazi Germany and the Louisiana populist Huey Long, an outspoken critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Lewis, it must be added, was not attached to a certain political view, but cited “warmth and lucidity” as the main concerns in his writings). His simultaneous cynicism and popularity during this raucous, optimistic period in American history might seem paradoxical at first glance. Tom Wolfe, a pillar of the New Journalism era, pondered in the preface of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities that it was Lewis’ access to material that sparked his success. The choice of subject “enabled Lewis to exercise with such rich variety his insights, many of them exceptionally subtle, into the psyches of men and women and into the status structure of society.” Like the avant-garde journalists Balzac, Zola, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, Lewis became a reporter who tried to catch the reality of society at large. For Elmer Gantry, he changed his living place from New England to Kansas City to explore evangelist groups. He even organized Bible groups just for analyzing society and finding the truth. His wide selection of topics didn’t necessarily make him friends, but Lewis took it in stride:
“[…]there was one good pastor in California who, upon reading my Elmer Gantry, desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the State of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.”
Lewis became a scandalous figure in the eyes of money uncomfortable with his critiques. His final nomination and eventual winning of the Nobel in 1930 caused mixed reactions. Some authors congratulated him. Others were less pleased with Lewis as the standard-bearer of American literature. Theodore Dreiser, the famous naturalist, was allegedly devastated, as Richard Lingeman writes in his 2002 biography, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. Hemingway said that either Dreiser or Lewis would have been a goof choice, but preferred Ezra Pound and Irish author James Joyce. Critics denounced the alleged anti-American feeling Lewis deployed in his novels’ social criticism. Former U.S. ambassador and professor Rev. Henry Van Dyke even called Lewis an “insult” to America.
Despite being the first American to win the most prestigious prize in literature, there is now a large silence around Lewis. In his 2014 book Sinclair Lewis and the American Democracy, Steven Michels argues that Lewis was an author who wrote “for pay or to meet what he perceived to be the unquenchable public demand for his writing.” Other more generous accounts remain influential, but they are not universally endorsed. In my view, Carl Van Doren, who praised Lewis’ precision as “photographic gifts of accuracy,” probably hit the nail on the head: Main Street, for example, was read “to quarrel with it,” “to find out what all the world was talking about,” or “to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves.” The mass of readers was decisive.
Style also remains a stubborn reason why Lewis’ novels haven’t stood the test of time like those of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and others. Sometimes, I admit, you really feel that his writing is a little boring and slow. Yet, I would ask: where else can you find the life of villagers unfolded in such a detailed and precise, albeit satirical, way? And what about the razor-sharp social criticism? Michels’ book addresses another fundamental issue: Mark Schorer’s problematic 1961 biography, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, remained the only significant biography of Lewis for decades and cast a shadow on scholarship. Schorer apparently didn’t really care much for Lewis as a person nor his books and branded him as “one of the worst writers” (later, Schorer explained that he wrote the biography only for money). Despite all the criticism, Lewis published further novels until the late-1940s. But fewer and fewer syllabi feature his novels today.
But Lewis was never just for professors or syllabi. Not for nothing did Lewis title his Nobel speech “The American Fear of Literature.” He was referring to America’s fear of significant writers and novels of serious quality and jousting at rigid professors and critics who liked “their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.” Lewis vacillated between pessimism and optimism about the future of American literature, but was always confident that, with the Nobel Prize, the States would finally achieve fame in the field of arts. And they have been recognized: apart from Hemingway and Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and many more Americans have been awarded the Nobel in literature. Even Bob Dylan won the Norwegian award. Lewis died in 1951 in Rome after years of struggle with alcoholism, but what he ushered into existence for America is obvious: he paved the way for international recognition and forged a new self-awareness for American writers. Recently, I met someone who had only read one American novel. It was by Sinclair Lewis. The rebel from the village succeeded.
by Luis Pintak
