SOURCE: "New Pioneering on the Prairies: Nature, Progress, and the Individual in the Novels of Sinclair Lewis," in American Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 5, December, 1973, pp. 558-77.

[In the following essay, Love discusses social criticism in the urban novels of Sinclair Lewis.]

"It's just that I have some kind of an unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic—help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens. It's this northern country—you know, stark and clean—and the brilliant lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward—it may be a new kind of land for a new kind of people, and it's scarcely even started yet."

Cass Timberlane

Perhaps no American writer of modern times has so insistently presented an ambivalent and divided artistic self to his readers and critics as has Sinclair Lewis. Participant and enthusiast as well as observer and critic, the scourge of American villages, doctors, preachers, businessmen, as well as—so Lewis later assured us—their heartiest well-wisher, he remains a compelling figure for the student of our culture. T. K. Whipple, in his well-known essay in Spokesmen over forty years ago, concluded that "Lewis is the most successful critic of American society because he is the best proof that his charges are just."¹ And more recently, Mark Schorer, Sheldon Grebstein and D. J. Dooley, in their books on Lewis, all demonstrate convincingly that he was a writer possessed of eternally warring qualities, that on almost any level of personal or artistic performance he reflected a persistent split in sensibility: lonely introvert versus mad exhibitionist, coy romancer versus satiric realist, defender versus derider of intellect and art, alternately ridden by, and rejecting, material success.² From this welter of contrarieties hopelessly yoked emerges what Schorer calls "the real enigma of his novels, a persistent conflict of values that clashed no less within him" (p. 4).

In this opposition of values, it is Lewis the nay-sayer, the tormentor of middle America, who has received the most attention. "The fact is," one typical judgment runs, "that Lewis is dull when being positive but delightful when being negative."³ Yet in attempting to understand more clearly the paradox which Schorer describes we are driven back to a fuller consideration of the other Lewis, the Lewis who would seem to claim a place in the main current of American idealism, who with Emerson and Whitman would project upon a native landscape the values of democratic individualism and a sublime conception of the future, and who would present in his fiction idealized alternatives to the society whose chronicler he was. This is the Lewis who scored the "contradiction between pioneering myth and actual slackness" in America, and who wrote of himself that he "mocked the cruder manifestations of Yankee Imperialism because he was, at heart, a fanatic American."⁴ While these counterforces of affirmation in Lewis' work have received scholarly attention, their function as a compelling, and at best controlling, set of ideas in the body of his novels is, I believe, open to further examination.⁵ Such examination may not only clarify our understanding of the main strands of Lewis' idealism and their interrelationships, but may also reveal how these patterns of affirmation pervade Lewis' fiction, emerging in his early novels, shaping his major books of the 1920s and finally dissolving into incoherence and frustration in his later works.

Cass Timberlane's speech, above, serves as illustration and starting point.⁶ It presents the reader with a unique cluster of images and ideas which may be seen to function prominently in Lewis' novels: an exalted Midwestern natural landscape, against which is set forth a visionary future (objectified as a modern creation, often a city), and a figure indigenous to this landscape—appropriate here even to his name—who stands as a harbinger or creator of this future. Characteristically, however, he is a potential rather than an actual creator of this new age. Associated with this grouping—idealized natural setting, city of the future and creative individual—are revealing aspects of style. Most notable is the metaphorical cast of the speaker's utterance, "setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens." Even the actual name, "Grand Republic," calls up the Utopian rhetoric of earlier Cass Timberlanes. And although Lewis may mock such Founding Father manifest-destinyism elsewhere in this novel (as well as in setting Kingsblood Royal in a racist Grand Republic and Babbitt in "Zenith") he is clearly sympathetic here to his speaker's conception. Related to this metaphorical distancing of subject is the tentativeness of the entire statement: "Some kind of an unformulated idea . . . what may be . . . you know . . . it may be. . . . " From what we come to know of the speaker, his lack of specificity suggests not a casual disregard for what he is saying, but rather the opposite. As with a Hemingway hero, the speaker's avoidance of a more precise articulation of his ideas is a measure of their potency to him, an appeal to the listener for a psychic response, an assumption of agreement below the word-surface. Even the use of dashes rather than conventional punctuation or transitions which would clarify the logical progression may be seen as a stylistic device to emphasize both the interrelatedness of these notions within the speaker's mind and the urgency behind them. Setting aside for the moment considerations of Cass Timberlane as novel, what Lewis provides in this passage is a prototype whose development and significance may be profitably examined.

This characteristic pattern of images and ideas emerges falteringly in the five early Lewis novels which antedate the publication of Main Street in 1920. Lewis' treatment of nature and landscape in these works, to begin with, seems to offer little opportunity for development. Despite his claim that Waiden was the chief influence upon his formative years, and his high praise of Thoreau, Lewis' early version of pastoral is often, unlike Thoreau's, merely the sentimental countryside rapture which has always flourished in our popular literature, to which category the early works may, on the face of it, be consigned.⁷ Nature in these novels is commonly simply an escape, albeit a beneficial and restorative one, and the urbanite ennobled and revivified by an Arcadian interlude is to become a stock figure for Lewis. The milquetoast, citified hero of his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), is, for example, propelled into self-reliance partly as a result of his walking trip through the English countryside. Similarly in The Innocents (1917) an elderly New York couple set out upon a walking trip across the country, and en route are rather incredibly transformed from shy nonentities into aggressive and successful go-getters.⁸ City girls like Ruth Winslow of The Trail of the Hawk (1915) and Claire Boltwood of Free Air (1919) change, through contact with nature, from Eastern, or "indoor," to Western, or "outdoor," women, thus completing a required rite of passage for Lewis heroines. As Lewis' sympathetic treatment of them prepares us for his later favorable view of "outdoor" women like Carol Kennicott in Main Street, Edith Cortright in Dodsworth, and Ann Vickers, so his dismissal of the "indoor" Gertie Cowles of The Trail of the Hawk presages his later unsympathetic treatment of "indoor" women like Joyce Lanyon of Arrowsmith, Fran Dodsworth and Jinny Timberlane, Cass' young wife, whose moral lapse accompanies her transition from "outdoor" to "indoor" woman.

Alert to the worst excesses of sentimental pastoral in these early works, Lewis tempers his treatment of nature by the inclusion of realistic or even satiric detail. For example, a country-engendered euphoria mistakenly causes Una Golden of The Job (1917) to succumb to "the thwarted boyish soul that persisted in Mr. Schwirtz's barbered, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whiskey-rotted, fattily-degenerated city body."⁹ In The Trail of the Hawk Lewis at one point spoofs the clichés of popular wilderness fiction at the same time that he repeats its basic values:

"If this were a story," said Carl, knocking the crusted snow from dead branches and dragging them toward the center of a small clearing, "the young hero from Joralemon would now remind the city gal that 'tis only among God's free hills that you can get an appetite, and then the author would say, 'Nothing had ever tasted so good as those trout, yanked from the brook and cooked to a turn on the sizzling coals.'" She looked at the stalwart young man, so skilfully frying the flapjacks, and contrasted him with the effeminate fops she had met on Fifth Avenue.¹⁰

This alternate milking and mocking of the conventions of the wilderness novel is a practice which Lewis carries on throughout Free Air as well as in the later Mantrap (1926). In Free Air Lewis includes realistic treatments of the primitive roads, temperamental automobiles, the occasional filthy hotel and backroad degenerate, the debunking of Milt Daggett's pulp-fiction stereotype of aggressive lumberjacks wooing and winning reticent maidens. Nevertheless, the larger conception of nature and the West which emerges from the novel is not Claire Boltwood's early impression of "rocks and stumps and socks on the line," but rather is that familiar mythic territory for which Milt serves as emblem.¹¹

Indeed, Lewis has a firmer grasp on these early characters whose linkage with nature is the result not of escape but of birthright. Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk and Milt Daggett of Free Air are presented as authentic native heroes, clear-eyed rural Midwesterners who have absorbed the sources of strength and vitality in the land itself. Such origins will be the means of legitimizing the aims and ennobling the character of later Lewis figures like Martin Arrowsmith, Sam Dodsworth, Cass Timberlane and Neil Kingsblood, as well as such minor but significant characters as Bone Stillman of The Trail of the Hawk and Miles Bjornstam of Main Street, both of whose association with wilderness—rather than simply rural—images is an index to their more radical individualism.¹² Still it is not merely in their origins but in their futures that Carl Ericson and Milt Daggett emerge as the most prophetic of Lewis' early heroes. Ericson, in particular, typifies Lewis' new American:

Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in speech, American in appearance save for his flaxen hair and china-blue eyes. . . . When he was born the "typical Americans" of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the "typical American" of his period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty. (p. 6)

Once again the problem with Lewis' characterization of this first of his visionary Westerners is that his validity as an archetypal figure is weakened by an occasionally effusive romantic overlay. To the young Carl Ericson, we are told, for example,

it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked" in stores on Saturdays or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the virile—and noisy—uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil of wire, poleclimbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs into the crisp pine wood of the lightingpoles, he carelessly ascended to the place of humming wires and red crossbars and green-glass insulators, while crowds of two and three small boys stared in awe from below. (p. 26)

Still, despite his tendency to veer off into cuteness, Lewis has discovered a figure of potentiality for him in a young Westerner who reads Scientific American, finds inspiration in his high school laboratory, and lusts after an automobile. Both in The Trail of the Hawk and in Free Air Lewis begins to turn his treatment of nature and the West—virtual synonyms for Lewis, as for Thoreau—away from a simplistic celebration of its potentialities for escape and toward an alliance with scientific progress. Carl Ericson and Milt Daggett are more than just two more in a procession of nature's noblemen; in addition to their irreproachable natural credentials they are both creative technologists, "new" men. Milt not only wins Claire Boltwood out west but prepares himself there for accession into the technological age, as represented by his study of engineering at the University of Washington. Beyond that lies what he envisions as a challenging career as a builder in Alaska. Carl becomes not only a famous pioneer aviator but also the inventor of a camping automobile called the Touricar, and an early version of the more substantial later designer and industrialist, Sam Dodsworth. Both young men, then, emerge as seminal heroes for Lewis, figures whose alliances both to the land and the technological future might qualify them as new American pioneers. Like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, these Lewis heroes cross the threshold from an agrarian past into an industrial future and their ability to mechanize successfully serves to demonstrate their claim to an appropriate role in the new age. Nature by itself was irrelevant, and the Westerner bound to the soil an anachronism. If "the American destiny of extending the western horizon" was to be advanced, as Lewis believed, it would be by the native Westerner who had grasped the new tools of science. Thus the old stalemate between machine and garden might be transformed into a progressive synthesis.¹³ In this important sense, Lewis is not merely lavishing exquisite praise upon nature, as T. K. Whipple accused him of doing (p. 227). Rather, Lewis reaches toward the awareness of his culture-hero Thoreau that nature exists most meaningfully in relationship to the civilization of its time rather than apart from it.

As novels, however, neither The Trail of the Hawk nor Free Air can be taken as seriously as their controlling theme would seem to require. Both are mired in the excesses of popular romance, and while Free Air ends before Milt Daggett's new pioneering actually begins, The Trail of the Hawk, instead of engaging seriously Carl Ericson's proposed archetypal role, diffuses it into a series of "adventures." It remained for Main Street, published in 1920, the year following Free Air, to manifest these early ideas in an imaginative work of primary importance, and to open a decade in which Lewis' new pioneers would occupy the center of most of his major works.

Although Main Street represented a critical and popular advance over the earlier novels, it bears important similarities to them in the figure of Carol Milford Kennicott. Like Milt Daggett she sees great work to be done in the future and eagerly anticipates her own part in it. Like Carl Ericson she is depicted as a representative new American: "The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest."¹⁴ And once again the heritage of the young seeker is an America still in the process of becoming, "bewildered" by the speed of its cultural change. The hill upon which Carol stands in the novel's opening sentences, "where Chippewas camped two generations ago," now looks out upon flour mills and the skyscrapers of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It is a land, she realizes later, whose work has scarcely begun, "the newest empire of the world. . . . They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers . . . and for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. . . . What future and what hope?" (pp. 28-29).

Like both Carl and Milt, Carol is a Midwesterner who is closely identified with the natural world. In the opening she stands beside the Mississippi, "in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky," and although Lewis playfully diminishes her pose by listing the random contents of her mind, he consistently identifies her eagerness of spirit with the potentiality for hope and beauty in the wide Midwestern landscape. Even when Gopher Prairie's ugliness and pettiness threaten to overwhelm her she can find in the land itself, as she does after a day spent hunting and walking with her husband, Will, "the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street" (p. 61). She is first attracted to Will by those qualities of his personality closest to her own: his fondness for tramping and the outdoors, his sense of the heroic Midwestern past, his occasional awareness of its possibilities for the future. His proposal of marriage is presented in the only the terms which Carol would have accepted: "'It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about'" (p. 22), and it is his failure to recognize the seriousness of this vow for Carol that lies at the base of their later misunderstandings. Failing to take Carol seriously, as Daniel Aaron has pointed out, is also a mistake for those, like H. L. Mencken, who see Carol only as a featherbrained romantic.¹⁵ It is, of course, just the visionary propensity which made her ridiculous to Mencken and others which defines her an an appropriate Lewis heroine.

What had begun for Carol during college as a reading assignment in a sociology class—a text on town-improvement—and a resolution to "'get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful'" (p. 11), seems to offer itself as actual opportunity through Will's proposal.¹⁶ But she soon finds that what Will and the townspeople have in mind by town-improvement is cosmetic rather than surgical. Her plans for social amelioration extend beyond that of rebuilding prairie towns (Will complains that she is "always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world" [p. 381], and she espouses typical progressivist ideas) but it is primarily as a thwarted builder and planner that she is presented to the reader. In the famous passage in which she walks down Main Street for the first time, only The Farmer's National Bank ("An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite, solitary" [p. 40]) escapes her catalogue of the town's ugliness, "planlessness" and "temporariness," where "each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others" (p. 41).¹⁷ Later when she analyzes more carefully the town's appearance it is with the eye of the builder and planner:

She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. (p. 260)

Another credulous Western innovator like Carl Ericson and Milt Daggett, Carol is a more compelling figure than either of her predecessors because of the extraordinary tension between the eager expectancy of her hopes and the forces of dullness and smugness which oppose her. Shut off from any meaningful work by her position as woman and wife, by her shallow education, by her own sentimentalism and flightiness, and by her sense of inadequacy to her task, she is finally resigned to her defeat at the close of the novel:

"She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska; a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia." (p. 431)

At the end, no longer even the potential creator, she remains a frustrated figure living under a self-imposed truce in a community which she might have transformed into something distinctive and beautiful, had she possessed the technical skill and the nerve to match her idealism.¹⁸ Technical skill and nerve are, of course, the attributes of her doctor-husband, Will, but without vision he remains merely the severed half of her incomplete self. What is called for in the wider design of Main Street is a sublime architect, a figure whose pragmatic technological mastery and courage to innovate are equal to the force of his, or her, dream.¹⁹

If Main Street shows us the incipient builder deprived of the realization of her goal—a new town on the prairie—Babbitt (1922) reverses the presentation to reveal the shining Midwestern city achieved, but without an appropriate creator to shape or interpret its destiny. Both novels are concerned with defining humane life for the citizens of a community; both ask at what point in the process of development this humane life can best be realized. Zenith has clearly gone beyond that point, as Gopher Prairie has failed to reach it. Instead of Main Street's heroic natural landscape blighted by human incompetence and pettiness, Babbitt presents a man-created world of immense technological dazzle, but finally devoid of meaningful relationships, not only among its inhabitants, but between man and landscape and between man and the products of his technology. It is a kind of upside-down Walden, where the buildings, houses, porcelain and tile bathrooms, and electric cigar-lighters overwhelm the human figures and reduce their actions to insignificance. As he did in Main Street, Lewis was dramatizing, in Babbitt, Lewis Mumford's contemporary observation that "architecture and civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions."²⁰ Lewis establishes the pattern at once as the novel opens: "The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings."²¹

From this panoramic view of a city "built—it seemed—for giants" (p. 6), the camera eye moves down, in a characteristically ironic Lewis juxtaposition, to focus upon the helpless figure of George F. Babbitt, asleep in his Dutch Colonial house in Floral Heights, and from there down to the alarm clock, the bathroom gadgets "so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board" (p. 8), the eyeglasses, the suit, the contents of Babbitt's pockets—all of the wares by which the new city asserts its mastery over its inhabitants. As the opening chapter ends, Lewis turns his reader's attention back to the encompassing city as Babbitt stands looking out his window over the city, where his attention is drawn to the Second National Bank Tower:

Its shining walls rose against April sky to a simple cornice like a streak of white fire. Integrity was in the tower, and decision. It bore its strength lightly as a tall soldier. As Babbitt stared, the nervousness was soothed from his face, his slack chin lifted in reverence. All he articulated was "That's one lovely sight!" but he was inspired by the rhythm of the city; his love of it renewed. He beheld the tower as a temple spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad "Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo" as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble. (pp. 14-15)

Lewis is of course satirizing that form of technological progress which is born of inadequate goals, which masks the emptiness and confusion of its inhabitants with a façade of gleaming limestone. Integrity, decision, strength—the proper qualities of the shapers of this new city—are possessed only by its commercial buildings. Whereas in Main Street we are shown the dream of a new civilization without the reality, in Babbitt we have the reality without the dream, a humming dynamo of a modern city whose external intimations of heroic accomplishment mock the meager-hearted underachievers who inhabit it. Babbitt, its representative man, can only barter its structures; he cannot create them.

Lewis clearly expects something more from his main figure. For George F. Babbitt is more than just the typical American businessman. He is also a Westerner, and the distinction, as the earlier works have demonstrated, is an important one for Lewis. As he explained it elsewhere, the Westerners may look like Easterners, "both groups are chiefly reverent toward banking, sound Republicanism, the playing of golf and bridge, and the possession of large motors. But whereas the Easterner is content with these symbols and smugly desires nothing else, the Westerner, however golfocentric he may be, is not altogether satisfied. . . . secretly, wistfully he desires a beauty that he does not understand."²² Hence Babbitt's vague but insistent yearnings, perhaps the most important of which lead him away from the city and toward nature. Even his romantic fantasies with the "faery child" of his dreams occur in a series of natural settings—groves, gardens, moors, the sea. But more striking are those occasions when, seeking the balms of nature and male camaraderie, Babbitt heads off to the Maine woods to repeat the familiar American gesture of nonurban renewal. Even in Maine, of course, he cannot shake off the city which claims him. His dress and behavior in the woods are absurdly out of place: "[Babbitt] came out . . . in khaki shirt and vast and flapping khaki trousers. It was excessively new khaki; his rimless spectacles belonged to a city office; and his face was not tanned but a city pink. He made a discordant noise in the place. But with infinite satisfaction he slapped his legs and crowed, "Say, this is getting back home, eh?" (p. 124).

His conception of his Maine guide, Joe Paradise, as an incorruptible Leatherstocking and an appropriate model for his own revivification is destroyed when Joe reveals himself as a backwoods Babbitt, one who will walk or canoe in to the best fishing places if the sports insist, but who prefers a flat-bottom boat with an Evinrude, and who looks forward to the day when he can open a shoe store in town. Thus Babbitt—too addled by his Zenith existence to absorb the regenerative silence of the woods, bereft by the loss of his friend Paul Riesling, and deprived, by Joe Paradise's abdication, of an appropriate model of conduct toward nature—finds himself drawn back to his city as one who "could never run away from Zenith and family and office, because in his own brain he bore the office and the family and every street and disquiet and illusion of Zenith" (p. 242). Babbitt's retreat into nature fails as do his escapes into bohemianism and liberalism because Zenith has drained him of the values of hope and freedom which are his Western birthright, and he is thus incapable of grasping the terms of his dilemma. The call of the wild is indubitably real to Babbitt, as it has perhaps always been to Americans, but his fragmentary and childish conception of it ("moccasins—six-gun—frontier town—gamblers—sleep under the stars—be a regular man, with he-men like Joe Paradise—gosh!" [p. 238]) renders him vulnerable to confusion and failure. The novel ends, as did Main Street, with a chastened rebel, but Babbitt remains at last a more pathetic figure than Carol Kennicott, for unlike her he is never able to formulate coherently the dream which he is finally forced to deny. Only Babbitt's son Ted, the rebellious would-be inventor and mechanic, emerges at the end as an emblem of the hopeful future, a potential new technocrat who may rise out of Babbitt's ashes.

In Arrow smith (1925) Lewis for the first time in a major novel presents a main character whose consequence as an agent of cultural progress matches his technical mastery and his dedication to his goal. Martin Arrowsmith, the doctor turned researcher, is an amalgam of the earlier Doc Kennicott and the visionary Carol. "I desired," Lewis recalled later, "to portray a more significant medico than Kennicott—one who could get beneath routine practice into the scientific foundation of medicine; one who should immensely affect all life."²³ Along with his scientific credentials, Arrowsmith possesses in his Midwestern roots the requisite benisons of nature. The book opens with the scene of a wagon carrying his pioneer forebears through the Ohio wilderness, and with his great-grand-mother-to-be saying portentously, "'Nobody ain't going to take us in. . . . We're going on jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing!'"²⁴ Heavy-handed as it sometimes is, the novel's frequently noted pioneering theme is appropriate to Arrowsmith in the realistic as well as mythic sense: that is, as a heroic explorer of unknown frontiers, he is not quite the perfect social being. In this sense, nature has a double function in the novel, not only to ennoble the hero but to humanize him, as is seen in the description of his early summer spent stringing telephone lines in Montana: "The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was" (p. 33). From the linemen, admirable rustic technologists, Martin's cold idealism receives a lesson in humanity.

In the book's ending, Lewis provides the highest moral vindication of Martin's rejection of society by presenting it as a Thoreauvian retreat to the Vermont woods, complete with rough shack, pond, woodland neighbors, even a latter-day Thoreau himself in the abrasively individualistic Terry Wickett. Improbable as this conclusion may seem after the careful realism of the earlier sections, Martin Arrowsmith's cabin-laboratory is an unmistakable projection of Lewis' linked themes of scientific progress, creative individualism and nature.²⁵

It should be added, however, that in its apparent denial of the possibilities for reconciliation between the questing individual and society, the ending of Arrowsmith is uncharacteristic of Lewis. With this exception, it is not the wilds but the middle landscape between raw nature and the city which comprises the appropriate terrain for the Lewis hero.²⁶ And that hero will not again be a scientist, that is, an essentially abstract creator whose purpose and function is to add to, rather than to apply, new knowledge. Rather, Lewis will return to the pragmatic designer, builder and architect as his representative hero. Even Arrowsmith, of course, resists classification as a "pure" scientist in the category of a Max Gottlieb or Terry Wickett. Arrowsmith's humane impulses prevail over his scientific duties in the plague episode, and the experiment is a failure. Nevertheless, Arrowsmith remains as Lewis' only new pioneer who may justifiably be termed radical. If Arrowsmith is the high point of Lewis' radical individualism, Dodsworth (1929) presents the fullest treatment of the more characteristic figure toward whom the earlier novels have been pointing.²⁷ In the opportunities for self-examination afforded by a trip to Europe with his wife, Fran, Sam Dodsworth, 50-year-old industrialist, decides that he wants to return to America and do something more with the rest of his life than build automobiles. Fran, conversely, selfishly worries over the loss of her youth and is increasingly attracted to aimless travel and superficial Europeans. After their separation, Sam meets Edith Cortright, a sympathetic widow whom, after various rebounds to Fran, he is finally to marry. During the course of the novel he has become interested in the garden suburb movement, as typified historically by Forest Hills on Long Island and its more flamboyant imitations, as represented by Zenith's "Sans Souci Gardens":

To the north of Zenith, among wooded hills above the Chaloosa River, there was being laid out one of the astonishing suburbs which have appeared in America since 1910. So far as possible, the builders kept the beauties of forest and hills and river; the roads were not to be broad straight gashes butting their way through hills, but winding byways. . . .

It came to him that now there was but little pioneering in manufacturing motors; that he hadn't much desire to fling out more cars on the packed highways. To create houses, . . . noble houses that would last three hundred years, and not be scrapped in a year, as cars were—

"That'd be interesting," said Sam Dodsworth, the builder.²⁸

In pursuing this venture, Dodsworth prepares to become Lewis' most significant and characteristic new pioneer: a Western idealist who has mastered the technology necessary to achieve his goal, a goal which is sanctioned by its associations both with cultural progress and with nature. Dodsworth the automobile manufacturer is, in an age of automobiles, merely serving the social order without guiding or ameliorating its destiny. He cannot "immensely affect all life." The anticipated shift of his role to that of designer and builder of wooded suburbs promises to elevate him from mechanic to creator. A materialist who can yield to the dream that is his Western inheritance but who nevertheless retains his mastery of the industrial technology, a searcher who has weighed his native values against the soft sophistication of Europe, Dodsworth, more than any other of Lewis' heroes, seems both properly qualified and properly motivated to move society along the path toward its appropriate future.

It should be emphasized at this point that if Arrowsmith is Lewis' Thoreauvian hero, Dodsworth is his Emersonian hero, and the latter figure, despite Lewis' stated praise of Thoreau and disparagement of Emerson, is the more typical of Lewis' work.²⁹ In his commitment to technological progress here and elsewhere Lewis comes into sharp conflict with Thoreau, who stood grimly on the side of nature in what he often depicted as a virtual state of warfare between country and city. Lewis, on the other hand, can hardly restrain his enthusiasm in the presence of advancing civilization:

My delight in watching the small Middle Western cities grow, sometimes beautifully and sometimes hideously, and usually both together, from sod shanties to log huts to embarrassed-looking skinny white frame buildings to sixteen-story hotels and the thirty-story bank buildings, may be commented on casually. There is a miracle in the story of how all this has happened in two or three generations. Yet, after this period, which is scarcely a second in historic time, we have a settled civilization with traditions and virtues and foolishness as fixed as those of the oldest tribe of Europe. I merely submit that such a theme is a challenge to all the resources a novelist can summon.³⁰

It is not Thoreau but Emerson who was Lewis' predecessor and who might have provided Lewis with a shock of recognition had he read Emerson more carefully. Lewis precisely echoes Emerson's belief that a civilization is to be judged by the extent to which it draws the most benefit from its cities. Like Emerson, Lewis sees nature and the city as ultimately reconciled through the city's being related more closely to its natural environment. Like Emerson, he envisions this reconciliation as the role of a heroic man of action who will, fulfill his own destiny and that of the nation in carrying out this synthesis. Like Emerson, Lewis conceived of this figure as a Western "cosmopolitan," one who would combine within himself natural and urban attributes. Finally, like Emerson, Lewis' emblem for the American future is what Michael Cowan, in his study of Emerson, calls a "City of the West," a combining and reconciling of industrial and Arcadian values.³¹

Although Dodsworth is the culmination of Lewis' efforts to bring forth a visionary Western technologist, the work reveals a troublesome lessening of intensity toward the implications and consequences of his theme, an inability or unwillingness to follow it through to its novelistic conclusions. Dodsworth closes with the promise of a new life for Sam, but he has now bounced from wooded estates to travel trailers, which he has imagined as carrying urbanites in comfort into the forest. ("'Kind of a shame to have 'em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, that's just sentimentality,' he assured himself [p. 27]). And houses or trailers, we are never witness to their creation, nor do they quite qualify for their role, however much they might widen the vistas of nature-hungry Americans. The earlier dream of a Carol Kennicott, hazy as it was, embraced the entire community in a gesture of democratic inclusiveness, rather than just that comfortably well-off portion of it to which Sam Dodsworth has limited himself.

In such curiously diminished forms, Western builders will continue to appear in Lewis' later novels. Myron Weagle of Work of Art (1934), for example, actually achieves his version of a city in the West, but the reader has difficulty in taking it seriously. A New England hotelkeeper whose career is devoted to the creation of "the Perfect Hotel Inn," Weagle moves through a frustrating career, heads west, buys a small hotel in a Kansas town, and turns it into a "work of art," as opposed to the cheap and meretricious books turned out by his writer-brother. But after the larger design of Lewis' earlier works, an innkeeper, however proficient, scarcely qualifies as a pioneer of progress, nor does his Western inn begin to fill the expansive canvas which Lewis has prepared.

The same sorts of truncated dreamers and deflated visions are found in Lewis' four final novels. Cass Timberlane (1945) first establishes a panoramic West and a properly idealistic, if middle-aged, Westerner and then reverts almost entirely to domestic affairs. For Neil Kingsblood (Kingsblood Royal, 1947), the hopeful Western horizon has shrunk to his suburban home in Sylvan Park, a disquieting version of Sam Dodsworth's earlier dream suburb. Here, according to the brochure of Mr. William Stopple, realtor, "gracious living, artistic landscaping, the American Way of Life, and up-to-the-minute conveniences are exemplified in 'Dream o' Mine Come True' . . . ," while at the same time Mr. Stopple privately advises that Sylvan Park "is just as free of Jews, Italians, Negroes, and the exasperatingly poor as it is of noise, mosquitoes, and rectangularity of streets."³² While Neil Kingsblood and his wife jeer at the rhetoric of the Stopple brochure, they nevertheless unabashedly regard Sylvan Park as "a paradise and a highly sensible paradise" (p. 10); and while they come to reject the racist values of suburbia, they finally take up guns to preserve their place within it. In The God-Seeker (1949), Lewis exchanges new pioneering for old, but the pattern of reduction remains. Aaron Gadd abandons the larger dream which has sent him west to the Minnesota frontier and returns to his trade of carpentry: "There are many things I don't ever expect to know, and I'm not going to devote myself to preaching about them but to building woodsheds so true and tight that they don't need ivory and fine gold—straight white pine, cedar shingles, a door that won't bind—glorious!'"³³

Finally, in Lewis' last novel, World So Wide (1951), the hopeful Western horizon has simply turned into blank wall. Once again, Lewis posits his familiar builder-hero, but here his dream does not survive even the opening chapter. Hayden Chart, an architect of the Western city of "Newlife," Colorado ("that big, huge place where you look up to the horizon") decides on page nine that, after his wife's accidental death, he must turn from the task which was to have been his life's work: "now he would never build that prairie village which was to have been housed in one skyscraper: the first solution in history of rural isolation and loneliness."³⁴ As Chart's prairie skyscraper-village diffuses into a world so wide, his life peters out into aimless travel, a pathetic following after Meaningful Experiences. As a final stroke, Lewis revives the figures of Sam and Edith Dodsworth, who befriend Chart in Europe. The Dodsworths, we learn, have left America after returning there for only a short time, having found, as Sam confides, that Europe has "spoiled" them for life in America (p. 46). Even offstage Lewis' American dream cannot sustain itself.

These reformed visionaries of his later works demonstrate Lewis' difficulty in engaging fully the concept of new pioneering which engrossed him throughout his career as novelist. In one respect, these Wester pilgrims, forever diverting themselves from the shining city on a prairie which is their professed destination, may dramatize their creator's misjudgment of his own abilities: although Lewis' impulses were often romantic and idealistic, his talents did not extend beyond the rendering of the actual. He may thus be seen as the victim of an idea which compelled him even as its formulation resisted his efforts to bring it to fictional life. In another respect, the halfhearted builders may suggest a failure of will on Lewis' part, another manifestation of a familiar American failure, as Frederick I. Carpenter describes it: "The idealist, recognizing that his vision of perfection is impossible, renounces his vision and 'returns to reality.'"³⁵ Yet it is not Lewis' renunciation of his vision that is most striking, but rather that he clings to it long after it has ceased to be a working force in his fiction, that he finally cannot renounce the vision. While the dream goes slack or is vulgarized in the later works, we are nevertheless left with an assertion of, or preoccupation with, a basic belief which remains consistent throughout Lewis' novels and which seems to transcend the divided self which Schorer and others have portrayed. Whether Lewis defines the good life explicitly in the idealistic hopes of his characters, or implicitly in the objects he selects for attack, the satirist and idealist in him merge in the moral basis from which both modes proceed.

From what we know of the man it is difficult not to speculate that Lewis, who could write of himself that "there never was in private life a less attractive or admirable fellow," and who, in reality, never revealed a deep appreciation of nature, sought in the visionary plans and pastoral associations of his main characters the means of legitimizing himself as an artist and a man.³⁶ His tendency to identify himself publicly with his fictional creations (e.g., Carl Ericson, Carol Kennicott, Martin Arrowsmith) suggests strongly that we may find in the novels fictional surrogates for this restless and unattractive loner.³⁷ Ridden all of his life by a deep sense of inferiority to the doctors in his family, his father and his brother Claude, Lewis, through his Western builders, may have sought the means to vindicate himself as a creator, to authenticate his own personal worth and dignity, something which he felt his family never accorded him in his career as a writer.³⁸ If the speculation is valid, it cannot have escaped Lewis that in his Arrowsmiths and Dodsworths he possessed a potent challenge to the superiority of the Lewis family doctors, who, unlike the creators, had not the power to "immensely affect all life." Nor was it likely that he could overlook, in the impotence and failure of his later fictional heroes, the evidence of his own inability, at last, to validate his vision as a creator. Seen thus, the Lewis canon offers itself as an ironic affirmation of Leon Edel's claim, in writing of Willa Cather, that an artist's works constitute a kind of supreme biography of their creator.

Nevertheless, preoccupation with the long downward slope of Lewis' career in the years from the publication of Dodsworth to his death in 1951 should not, as Sheldon Grebstein reminds us, divert attention from his lasting achievements of the 1920s. In Main Street, Arrowsmith and Dodsworth, and in the brilliant inversions of Babbitt, Lewis demonstrated his rightful claim to a place among those writers who have examined the sources of validity in American idealism, and who have created in their works new emblems of possibility to be measured against the failures of the present. While it may be objected that we search almost without success for those changes actually wrought by Lewis' Western creators, the same criticism might be applied to nearly any of the visionary designs in our literature. Fragmentary and resistant to close scrutiny they may still propose fresh possibilities to the imagination while they miscarry in actuality. A more formidable objection is that Lewis' new pioneering fails not because it emphasizes the disparity between the real and the ideal but because it insists upon the possibilities for their reconciliation. To a generation of critics and readers securely beyond innocence and accustomed to the assumption that the frontier is closed and that the presence of the machine in the garden must cause the serious artist to turn inevitably in the direction of tragedy, Lewis' idealistic technologists must seem to have either naively misjudged the realities or sold out to them. In Lewis' defense it must be questioned whether such judgments are not too narrowly conceived if they rule out a figure of his literary significance. Somewhere, Lewis believed, between the sod shanty and the asphalt parking lot we had missed civilization, but perhaps it was still not too late. Like the older progressives of the turn of the century, he saw the historical process as a means of transcending the old paradox of industrial civilization destroying the American garden. Through his novels he continually asserts the prodigious speed with which the country was growing and changing, and his belief that the culture which emerged from this ferment of growth and change could be shaped and heightened by such fictional heroes and heroines as he created, and by such a writer as he himself wished to be. Thus we have his revealing assertion to Perry Miller that, "'I love America . . . I love it, but I don't like it'," and his repeated claim that he wanted to raise the cultural maturity of America by mocking its "cruder manifestations."³⁹ When he complained of and satirized the pioneer myth, he did so only when it became an empty memorializing of the past and an apology for present mediocrity, rather than an impetus toward advancing our cultural possibilities. To participate in the formulation and direction of this emerging culture was Lewis' aim as a writer. Hence his characteristic version of American pastoral calls for the cultivation rather than the rejection of progressive human aspirations, and in his new pioneers he found a unique means to combine the diverse aims of personal freedom and social obligation. The fundamental Lewis hero hopes thus, through the product of his creative endeavors—invention, building, town, city, medical discovery—to assert not only his own individuality but also his participation in the social order and his commitment to the shaping of the emerging new society.

If his best works embody this conception of the appropriate role for new leaders of America, the total body of his novels has an even wider significance for the student of our culture, for there he preserves an important record of the impact of modern technology upon the tenaciously held Arcadian myths of middle America. Indeed, his shortcomings as an artist may be a function of his appropriateness as a cultural representative. As an artist, he shared with many of his fictional characters an impatience with long-range goals, a propensity for being too easily diverted, a tendency, like the historical pioneer, to move on, leaving disordered and unfinished landscapes behind him, without pondering the consequences. In this sense do Lewis' artistic inadequacies constitute a kind of sardonic tribute to his superb gifts of mimicry and photographic realism, an ultimate stamp of corroboration upon his own, self-proclaimed "fanatic" Americanness.

¹Spokesmen: Modern Writers and American Life (New York: Appleton, 1928), p. 228. After the original note to a work, and in cases where its title is indicated in the text, page citations will be included in the text.

² Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961); Sheldon Grebstein, Sinclair Lewis (New York: Twayne, 1962); D. J. Dooley, The Art of Sinclair Lewis (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967).

³ Maurice Kramer, "Sinclair Lewis and the Hollow Center," The Twenties: Poetry and Prose, eds. Richard E. Langford and William E. Taylor (Deland, Fla.: Everett Edwards, 1966), p. 69.

⁴ The "contradiction . .." statement is from Lewis' unpublished "Introduction to Babbitt," in The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings: 1904-1950, eds. Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York: Pocket Books, 1963), p. 26. Hereafter cited as MMS. Lewis' self-description is from "The Death of Arrowsmith," MMS, p. 105.

⁵ Two important earlier studies which treat aspects of Lewis' idealism are Frederick I. Carpenter's "Sinclair Lewis and the Fortress of Reality," in his American Literature and the Dream (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), pp. 116-25, and Maxwell Geismar's "Sinclair Lewis: The Comic Bourjoyce," in his The Last of the Provincials (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 69-150. I have also found stimulating the final chapter of D. J. Dooley's work (note 2), as well as passing references in Grebstein and Schorer, especially pp. 810-11 in the latter's monumental critical biography.

⁶Cass Timberlane (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 28.

⁷ For Lewis' praise of Thoreau and Waiden see "Introduction to Four Days on the Webutuck River," MMS, pp. 169-70, and "One-Man Revolution," MMS, pp. 242-44.

⁸ The wilderness rehabilitation at its most strained is found in Lewis' later work, The Prodigal Parents (1938), where Fred Cornplow rescues his dull-witted son from sloth and dissipation by forcing him into a canoe trip through the Canadian wilderness. With greater restraint, however, Lewis (himself an inveterate walker) will portray, in Main Street and Dodsworth, the hike through the countryside as a convincing effort by his characters to break away from destructive and inhibiting social pressures.

⁹The Job (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1917), p. 203.

¹⁰The Trail of the Hawk (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1915), pp. 316-17.

¹¹Free Air (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1919), p. 190.

¹² In Kingsblood Royal (1947), Neil Kingsblood's discovery of his black ancestor, Xavier Pic, is cushioned for the hero (and, one suspects, for Lewis and his audience) by Pic's having been an intrepid voyageur and explorer of the Northern wilds.

¹³ For a discussion of 19th century versions of the alliance of nature and technology, see Leo Marx's section on "the rhetoric of the technological sublime," in his The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 195-207. I have assumed here and at the conclusion of my essay that the title and thesis of Marx's book are well enough known not to require documentation.

¹⁴Main Street (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 7-8.

¹⁵ Daniel Aaron, "Main Street," in The American Novel, ed. Wallace Stegner (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 171.

¹⁶ In attempting to find whether Lewis had an actual book in mind as the source for Carol's textbook, one is drawn back to Ebeneezer Howard's influential Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), first published in 1898 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and to the many books and periodicals which it spawned. Prof. Walter Creese, Dept. of Architecture, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, a student of this and related town-planning movements, has suggested, in answer to my inquiry to him, that Carol's text is probably a blend of these. Carol's college years (approximately 1904-7, according to Schorer's chronology) were the period in which the Garden City movement was flourishing. Lewis' frequent references to town-planning and beautification in Main Street (see, e.g., pp. 129-30) and to garden suburbs and their historical development in Dodsworth demonstrate his familiarity with these movements.

¹⁷ In excepting the classical bank from Carol's catalogue of Main Street's unrelieved ugliness, Lewis again reveals his architectural awareness. Every town was likely to have such a bank at the time, a tribute to ascendant capitalism; but, further, innovative architects like Louis Sullivan were building in bold, new designs, many small-town banks across the Middle West. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these, judging by the prominence it is given in architectural histories, is the National Farmer's Bank (the name a reversal of Gopher Prairie's bank) in Owatonna, in Lewis' home state, constructed in 1907-8, on Sullivan's design. See, e.g., Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 126-29, and Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed, American Skyline (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 210, 222-23.

¹⁸ Vida Sherwin's judgment against Carol that she is "an impossibilist. And you give up too easily" (p. 263), seems to have been shared by Lewis to some extent, if we consider external evidence in the form of a "sequel" to the novel, a visit by the author, after a lapse of four years, to his imaginary town, which Lewis published in The Nation in 1924 (MMS, pp. 312-30). In Gopher Prairie, a new school building "with its clear windows, perfect ventilation, and warm hued tapestry brick," stands as testimony to Vida's effective gradualist tactics. The Carol of the sequel, dumpy and defeated, has no such memorial to mark her fitful efforts at town improvement.

¹⁹ Although the Lewis biographies (and a letter from Mark Schorer in response to my inquiry) indicate no direct evidence of Lewis' knowing Frank Lloyd Wright or his work, it is difficult to believe that Lewis, in whose works architecture is so often emphasized, would not be aware of Wright, or of the fact that Wright meets Lewis' requirements so admirably here, not only in Wright's radical innovativeness and technical skill, but in the extent to which, as the originator of "Prairie Architecture" at the turn of the century he gave architectural expression to the Middle Western landscape. See his Writings and Buildings (New York: Horizon, 1960), pp. 37 ff. See also the Wisconsin-born Wright's self-description as "grown up in the midst of a sentimental family planted on free soil by a grandly sentimental grandfather . . . the Welsh pioneer," and his claim that "the real American spirit, capable of judging an issue for its merits, lies in the West and Middle West, where breadth of view, independent thought and a tendency to take common sense into the realm of art, as in life, are characteristic. It is alone in an atmosphere of this nature that the Gothic spirit of building can be revived." (Quoted in Wayne Andrews, Architecture, Ambition and Americans [New York: Harper's, 1955]), p. 230.

²⁰Sticks and Stones, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 193.

²¹Babbitt (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 5.

²² "Minnesota, the Norse State," MMS, p. 283.

²³ Quoted in Schorer's "Afterword," Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 432.

²⁴Arrowsmith, p. 5.

²⁵ Arrowsmith's cabin-laboratory recalls the earlier shack of Miles Bjornstam in Main Street, where potbellied stove and bare pine floor share the scene with a work-bench and assorted volumes, including a manual on gasoline engines and one by Thorstein Veblen (p. 117).

²⁶ It is worth noting that Lewis, in a 1941 mock obituary about himself entitled "The Death of Arrowsmith," suggests a softening of Martin's denial of society (MMS, pp. 104-8). After the title, Lewis uses his own name in the mock obituary but refers to himself in terms synonymous with Arrowsmith. We are told that for the last ten or fifteen years of his life, Lewis-Arrowsmith has lived in a modest country estate in northwestern Connecticut, with his cats, his garden and his work. Thus we are left with a pastoral rather than a primitive landscape and with, in this bit of external evidence, the suggestion of synthesis rather than alienation.

²⁷ Mention should be made at this point of Lewis' intervening "big" book, Elmer Gantry (1927). It stands as a kind of negative pole for all of Lewis' motivations toward social progress and heroic individualism. Without even the vague yearnings and abortive attempts of a Babbitt to invest his life with meaning, Gantry is the ultimate parasite, and Lewis' satire is correspondingly relentless. The book's only true Christian antithesis to Gantry is a backwoods cleric who finds his God—predictably—in nature. But the Rev. Pengilly is a minor character whose forest mysticism remains etherialized and private, useless in any combat of ideas. Even a more vital and significant foil for Gantry like Frank Shallard offers Lewis no model for a hero. An honest doubter like Shallard is to be preferred to a thorough hypocrite like Gantry, to be sure, but the genus is not promising for Lewis. The preachers, like the practicing physicians and the businessmen, are Lewis' second-class citizens, functionaries and servants of the social order rather than its designers and creators.

²⁸Dodsworth (New York: New American Library, 1967), p. 182.

²⁹ See note 7. For Lewis' disparagement of Emerson, see MMS, pp. 15, 243.

³⁰ "A Note about Kingsblood Royal" MMS, p. 37. Compare this, for example, with Emerson: "The history of any settlement is an illustration of the whole—first the emigrant's camp, then the group of log cabins, then the cluster of white wooden towns. . . . and almost as soon followed by the brick and granite cities, which in another country would stand for centuries, but which here must soon give way to enduring marble" (Uncollected Lectures), quoted in Michael Cowan, City of the West: Emerson, America, and the Urban Metaphor (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 26.

³¹ I am indebted to Cowan's City of the West for my understanding of Emerson in this context.

³²Kingsblood Royal (New York: Random House, 1947), p. 10.

³³The God-Seeker (New York: Popular Library, 1949), p. 307.

³⁴World So Wide (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 9.

³⁵ Carpenter, p. 124.

³⁶ The quotation is from "Self-Portrait (Berlin. Aug. 1927)," MMS, p. 47. For the account of a calamitous actual encounter between Lewis and nature, see Claude Lewis' description of a trip with his brother into the Canadian wilds: Treaty Trip, Donald Green and George Knox, eds. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1959).

³⁷ For Lewis' identification of himself with Ericson and other of his characters, see "Self-Portrait," MMS, p. 46. For Lewis' admission that he was Carol, see Schorer, p. 286, and Grebstein, pp. 71, 171. His identification with Arrowsmith is the basis for his mock obituary, "The Death of Arrowsmith," MMS, pp. 104-8.

³⁸ Perry Miller, in his account of his friendship with Lewis at the end of the author's life, tells of Lewis' blowup when he, Miller, facetiously suggested in the presence of Lewis and his brother, Dr. Claude Lewis, that Claude would doubtless prefer visiting medical facilities in Leiden the following morning to hearing Lewis' lecture. Later, Miller says, Lewis apologized, saying, "'It's been that way from the beginning. . . . I wanted to write, and I've worked like hell at it, and the whole of Sauk Center and my family and America have never understood that it is work, that I haven't just been playing around, that this is every bit as important as Claude's hospital. When you said that Claude did not want to hear my lecture, . . . you set up all the resentments I have had ever since I can remember.'" Miller, "The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis," Atlantic, 187 (Apr. 1951), 34.

³⁹ Miller, p. 34. For Lewis' conception of his role as an agent of cultural progress, see note 4, and also Alexander Manson, "The Last Days of Sinclair Lewis" (as told to Helen Camp), Saturday Evening Post, 223 (Mar. 31, 1951), 110. See also Lewis' disparaging of the false myth of pioneering quoted in Schorer, p. 300.