On December 12, 1930, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis delivered what has been called “the most widely publicized address ever given by an American novelist.”¹ Those familiar with the contours of Lewis's career agree that this speech must be taken as the high point, the zenith of achievement and recognition beyond which he did not go. Charles Fenton says the address was Lewis at his very best: “calm, orderly, frequently humble, occasionally boyish, then momentarily savage with cruel sarcasm and icy authority.” Playing his tune in a variety of pitches, Lewis's range included “satire, irony, the belly laugh, gentle patience, outrageous burlesque, parody,” and exhortation.² His principal target was academic traditionalists, who “like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”³ And among that group he singled out the New Humanists, who, he charged, taught “a doctrine of the blackest reaction introduced into a stirringly revolutionary world.”⁴

It is interesting and somehow appropriate that this much-publicized attack should have come at the end of 1930, a year that marked the apex of the New Humanism's public impact, as well as of Lewis's acclaim. Lewis and the New Humanists are representative of the opposing literary-cultural forces that violently collided during the twenties. Those literary battles cleaved deep. No mere squabbling among rhetoricians, they were philosophical warfare over all that men hold dearest and over the future of American civilization itself. That period, with its national self-consciousness and intense and pervasive questioning of the way things were, gave birth to a new generation of artists and critics. Therefore, to understand Sinclair Lewis's relation to the New Humanism is to understand better the revolution in ideas, morals, and manners during the twenties that so significantly shaped American literary and intellectual culture in our century. It is also to understand better the inevitable mutual misunderstanding perennially obtaining in literary quarrels.

In criticizing the American Academy of Arts and Letters in his Nobel Prize speech, Lewis was following the lead of his friend H. L. Mencken. The National Institute of Arts and Letters was established in 1898 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters was created in 1904. From the 200 members of the former the 50 members of the latter were chosen. Mencken had begun attacking the Institute and the Academy early in the twenties.⁵ It was the link with Mencken that placed Lewis at the center of the literary and cultural tensions of the twenties. Martin Light has pointed out that “Mencken's ideas are traceable in the articles Lewis wrote in the twenties, and his views of literary history and literary criticism appear in Lewis's Nobel Prize speech, some ten or perhaps twenty years after Mencken had enunciated them.”⁶ Mark Schorer suggests that Mencken's A Book of Prefaces (1917) influenced the focus of Main Street, and in 1922 Lewis wrote Mencken that his review of Main Street had helped him select his target for Babbitt.⁷ In his biography of Mencken, William Manchester says that at the time of these novels “Lewis was looking to Mencken for critical tutelage.”⁸ Near the middle of the decade, Edmund Wilson wrote, “Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and the inhabitants of his Main Street are merely particular incarnations of the great American boob, evidently inspired by Mencken.”⁹ Lewis, in fiction, seemed to have had precisely the same aims that Mencken had in criticism. The two of them became the champions of the insurgent young men. In a press conference in 1922, Lewis said, “If I had the power, I'd make Henry Mencken the pope of America.”¹⁰ And in the Nobel speech he saluted him as “our most vivid critic.”¹¹

Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression, a revolution had overtaken American life in manners, morals, and all intellectual assumptions. Mencken had been the bass-drummer of this revolt. As the most aggressive and influential critical voice, he had set the beat. In Manchester's words, he had “sunk his well-muscled fist into the soft solar plexus of American rectitude.”¹² And, according to Schorer, “Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry, whatever their aesthetic limitations, had played a major part, probably the major literary part, in the transformation.”¹³ Thus Lewis's name became linked with Mencken's; and the New Humanists, who considered Mencken their principal antagonist, viewed Lewis as “Mencken's minion.”

The New Humanism, whose leading spokesmen were Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, originated as a reaction to the relativism, materialism, and naturalism of the modern age. It provided the first program of intellectual conservatism in our century. Its proponents, as J. David Hoeveler, Jr., characterizes them in his book on the movement, were “cultural traditionalists, defensive of classical principles in art, deeply skeptical about human nature, and neo-Burkean in their political and social views.”¹⁴ Although Babbitt and More, the intellectual architects of New Humanism, were actively publishing in the first two decades of the century, the movement did not win a wide hearing until America's “battle of the books,” which it generated in the late twenties. As a movement it went into eclipse during the thirties, but as Austin Warren emphatically insists, “It is a ‘VULGAR ERROR’ that, with the deaths of Babbitt and his ally, Paul Elmer More, in the 1930s, the ‘New Humanism’ movement became extinct. An error.” It “went underground.”¹⁵ Babbitt and More continue, of course, to be influential and respected figures in conservative thought.

It was the plight of the New Humanists to be identified as Puritans in a vigorously anti-Puritan decade. As Frederick J. Hoffman has demonstrated in The Twenties, efforts to define and describe Puritanism took up considerable portions of the time and energy of the intellectuals of the period. Van Wyck Brooks in “The Puritan's Will to Power” and Mencken in “Puritanism as a Literary Force,” both appearing in 1917, set the tone for the anti-Puritanism of the twenties. The word “Puritanism” came to be used in a special sense. Popular journalists and avant-garde literary culture used it to signify all that was undesirable about the status quo. Young writers after the War needed a scapegoat, a substantial enemy to whom they could attach responsibility for an outmoded and impractical morality. A symbol was constructed—the American Puritan. On his shoulders they laid the blame for the spiritual failures of a moralistic and an aesthetically numb America. They saw in their Puritan a will to power that led to repression and conformity and threatened free thought and creativity.

For Mencken Puritanism meant “the prejudice against beauty as a form of debauchery and corruption—the distrust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain accepted axioms—the belief in the eternal validity of moral concepts—in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of the lower orders of men.”¹⁶ He pitied those who had “sprained their souls trying to live according to the preposterous and impossible rules that moralists, lawmakers, prophets, theologians and other such donkeys lay down.”¹⁷ For him, Puritanism was a name for that complex of religious evangelism, shabby political moralism, and aggressive commercialism that constituted his boobus Americanus and provided not only Sinclair Lewis but also other young writers a platform from which to take literary pot shots at American culture.

The New Humanists were naturally identified as Puritans. Mencken called More “the eloquent fugleman of the Puritan ethic and aesthetic.”¹⁸ More once wrote to a friend, “Mencken says I should be a good fellow if I had drunk more whiskey and begotten more bastards.”¹⁹ Edmund Wilson, at the height of the New Humanist controversy, labeled More “an old-fashioned Puritan who has lost the Puritan theology without having lost the Puritan dogmatism.”²⁰ And about the same time, Harry Salpeter said of Irving Babbitt, “he is Calvinism applied to literature, the arts, philosophy, and science.”²¹ That the Humanists should be identified with Puritanism was inevitable, but one of Babbitt's former students, Stuart Sherman, licensed the identification when, in attacking German culture (and Mencken as an American spokesman for it) during World War I, he called the American ideal “Puritanism,” in which individual conscience rather than government supplied necessary restraint.

Mencken called for a novelist to treat “the most American of all Americans, the very Ur-Americaner—to wit, the malignant moralist, the Christian turned cannibal, the snouting and preposterous Puritan.”²² Lewis answered this call directly in Elmer Gantry, but already in Main Street a new strain of anti-Puritanism had appeared that was to dominate American fiction for ten years.

Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who found contemporary fiction distinctly uncongenial, had little regard for Lewis. More, in fact, suspected that Lewis had used the names Elmer Gantry and Babbitt as a slap at him and his friend. There seems to be no clear evidence that this was the case, but it is possible. For Lewis and Mencken, Babbitt and More were the epitome of a stodgy Puritanism, almost caricatures; and for Lewis, Mencken, and company their names were a perennial source of jokes. In a letter of February 27, 1922, Alfred Harcourt, Lewis's publisher, congratulated Lewis on his note declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and included this verse:

Said Elmer More to Stuart Sherman,
“Let's clean up these younger vermin.”
“All right, let's; they make me sore,”
Said Stuart Sherman to Elmer More.(23)

In the mid-twenties when the American Mercury was doing so well and Mencken was becoming a considerable hero on campus, he cracked that the returns from the universities made him sweat: he was beginning “to grow sclerotic and respectable” and was afraid he would become “Paul Elmer Mencken.”²⁴ At the news of Mencken's wedding, one fellow journalist raised the possibility that Mencken might “invite Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt to dinner, hug a Methodist bishop and announce for Dr. Hoover in 1932.”²⁵ When Lewis's son Michael was born in June 1930, Mencken, perpetuating the old joke, wrote, “I suggest naming the boy Irving Babbitt Lewis.”²⁶

The names of Babbitt and More were used in such ways by Lewis, Mencken, and their friends because they viewed these Humanists as symbols rather than as persons, and this depersonalization was partly deliberate. As Manchester explains, Mencken preferred “not to know his targets; better, he felt, they should remain to him the caricatures they became for his readers.”²⁷ It was this caricaturization that did most to discredit the New Humanists. Its effects have lingered now for over fifty years. Seward Collins described it in 1932 as the “Myth of the Nasty, Mean, Horrid Old Man,” which asserts that the Humanists are “hard-hearted old men determined to maintain their authority against aspiring youth; that they are fixed in ancient ways and petulantly annoyed with novelty; that they are arrogantly trying to elevate their own narrow preoccupations into universal edicts.” Pairs such as the following were set up: critical—creative, repressive—liberating, intellectual—emotional, old—new, cold—warm, reason—imagination, business—art, narrow—broad, dogma—choice, reaction—progress, authority—individualism, tradition—experiment, and so on. The Humanist was always placed on what was considered the negative side.²⁸

What did More and Babbitt have to say about Lewis? More thought Main Street owed its vogue in part to its title, which he thought was a stroke of genius,

… and in part to its flattery of those who like to believe they are better folk than the dull hypocrites who grovel and boast in so typical a community as Gopher Prairie. … Otherwise it is hard to account for the success of so monotonous a tale written in so drab and drizzling a style. One might feel there was something wholesome in this satirical treatment of the very sources of realism, were it only possible to discover anywhere in the pages of Mr. Lewis … an indication that the author himself had risen more than an inch above the aesthetic and ethical level of the people he insults.²⁹

Babbitt's complaints about Lewis focused on vulgarity and lack of standards. Writers like Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Lewis, he said, make us feel that “if there were any lack of vulgarity in what they are depicting, they would be capable of supplying the defect from their own abundance.” In the absence of humanistic or religious standards, said Babbitt, a writer like Lewis is “prone to confound the real with the welter of the actual, and so miss the ‘grand generality.’” He considered Lewis as one of the writers so concerned with “the evanescent surfaces of life” that if their work survives it will do so as sociological document rather than as literature. Instead of imposing an orderly pattern on the raw material of experience, they emphasize the lack of pattern.³⁰ Babbitt accused Lewis of gradually drifting into materialism while at the same time fancying himself to be a radiant idealist. In speaking of Main Street, he insisted that satire, to be worthwhile, must be constructive. “The opposite of the trivial is the distinguished; and one can determine what is distinguished only with reference to standards. To see Main Street on a background of standards would be decidedly helpful; but standards are precisely what our so-called realists lack. They are themselves a part of the disease that they are attempting to define.”³¹ Babbitt thought that in Elmer Gantry Lewis dealt with a large question without sufficient depth of reflection and critical maturity. The novel is “a wild diatribe which, considered even as such, is largely beside the mark.” According to Babbitt, “If the Protestant Church is at present threatened with bankruptcy, it is not because it produces an occasional Elmer Gantry.” The real problem is that it has lost its grip on certain dogmas and on the facts of human nature. It has lost touch with the dogma of original sin, a dogma that produces humility.³² Babbitt did not like standardized Philistinism any better than did Lewis, but he believed that laments about its evils accomplished little unless supported by a sound constructive program:

If all that is needed is to scoff at the Rotarian convention and the “religion of service,” writers like Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair Lewis would seem to meet every requirement. These writers can be shown, however, to be a part of the very malady they are assailing. The malady may be defined as a refusal to recognize any norm or human law that acts restrictively on the free expansion of temperament.³³

When one compares Lewis with Babbitt and More, the reasons for their mutual dislike and misunderstanding are obvious. Although only about twenty years separated them in age, they were of quite different generations. Lewis matured in a period of influential liberalism, an era of progressivism characterized by reformist zeal and democratic hopes. Babbitt and More were weaned on the classics, tradition, and an aristocratic distrust of democracy and shallow humanitarian reform. All three came from the Midwest (Minnesota, Ohio, Missouri), but Babbitt and More turned their backs on the provincialism of the Midwest in favor of serious learning and teaching in the academic environments of Harvard and Princeton. Lewis, although restlessly trying to live everywhere, felt rooted in the Midwest, and although he did some university teaching, was always uncomfortable in the academic environment. George Slocombe remarked that Lewis was “acutely and morbidly” envious of superior literary gentlemen: “Much of his challenging, boastful, noisy and childish insolence was the mere insolence of the parvenu which he felt himself to be in the circles of the elect.”³⁴

Lewis was drawn to socialism and throughout his career desired to write a great labor novel. For Babbitt and More socialism was anathema, and they had no significant sympathy with the labor movement. Lewis, after an intense religious phase in his youth, maintained a preoccupation with religion throughout his life, but mostly as an object of irony and satire. In contrast, “Religion was Humanism's alter ego,” says Hoeveler. It was an ally and friend and elicited the Humanists' warmest affection, despite occasional rebukes.³⁵ Lewis, according to Schorer, “had no sense of the tragic nature of human experience.”³⁶ Babbitt and More, on the other hand, had a fervent belief in a higher nature in man coupled with a profound conviction of the reality of evil. Lewis's literary taste was undiscriminating. He inclined toward current books and was constantly reading a manuscript by a new acquaintance and enthusiastically recommending it to his publisher. Babbitt and More had little appetite for contemporary literature and measured a new book rigorously by the masterworks of world literature. In his Nobel speech, Lewis said American writers have survived without standards and the strong young men have perhaps been better off without them.³⁷ As is obvious in their comments on Lewis quoted above, Babbitt and More believed that a sense of standards is indispensable. Lewis suffered from what Schorer calls “a deficient sense of history,”³⁸ while Babbitt and More prized above all things the historical sense.

In characterizing Lewis, Schorer speaks of “his delight in the present, the topical, his infatuation with the new and the efficient, his raucous skepticism, the explosive satirical vein, the mimic fidelity, the naturalistic compulsion to put in everything, the crowded externality.”³⁹ Lewis's friend Ludwig Lewisohn said of him, “He seemed to have no inner certainty, no balance, no serenity, nothing between heaven and earth to which he could withdraw for quietude or healing.”⁴⁰ Another friend, Rebecca West, made a similar observation: “If he would sit still so that life could make any deep impression on him, if he would attach himself to the human tradition by occasionally reading a book which would set him a standard of profundity, he could give his genius a chance.”⁴¹ These qualities contrast jarringly with Babbitt and More's emphasis on the “inner check,” the “law of measure,” tradition, discriminating selectivity, and a healthy skepticism that, while keenly aware of the faults and foolishness of human society, maintains a faith in the possibility for human growth and achievement.

This list of contrasts could easily be extended, but one more point should suffice. Although both Lewis and the Humanists treated American society negatively, their criticism resulted from quite different concerns. Lewis was principally interested in the social and economic roots of disorder; Babbitt and More were concerned with the intellectual and the cultural. Babbitt and More explained the problems of materialistic and commercial American society in terms of the intellectual and cultural past. They were detectives of ideas and tendencies in intellectual history and generally ignored the impact of technology and the capitalist social structure that Lewis and others saw as the source of American acquisitiveness and exploitation. Lewis's indictment of American philistinism often called for greater political, social, and intellectual freedom. In contrast, Babbitt and More saw too much freedom and lack of restraint as the very source of the problem and traced the development of ideas since the Enlightenment as evidence. As Babbitt put it, “The characteristic evils of the present age arise from unrestraint and violation of the law of measure and not, as our modernists would have us believe, from the tyranny of taboos and traditional inhibitions.”⁴²

Why did Lewis choose the occasion of his Nobel acceptance speech to attack the New Humanists when he had not singled them out publicly before? Fenton says the very fact of the attack, let alone its ferocity, was unsettling to the men of letters because they had been slandering Lewis for ten years with impunity. He suggests that Lewis had been after other game and had ignored the abuse. According to Fenton, members of the Institute and Academy had frequently used Lewis as a bad example. “He had been a tranquil monster upon whom the junior men of letters could be trained, a required but not dangerous test in a kind of literary combat course. Now he had violated all the ground rules. He was using live ammunition.”⁴³

A combination of factors prompted Lewis to target the New Humanism at this particular time. He was speaking in the last month of the year in which the Humanist movement reached its pinnacle. For about two years, Humanism had received a widespread hearing in literary journals. T. S. Eliot, as editor of the Criterion, encouraged articles reflecting the movement's perspective. This provided an audience in England. John Farrar and Henry Goddard Leach opened the pages of the Bookman and Forum to its proponents, and when Seward Collins succeeded Farrar as editor in 1928, the Bookman became avowedly pro-New Humanism. William Manchester, seeing things with Mencken in mind, suggests that the New Humanism at the end of the twenties swept into a vacuum created by “the Mercury's nihilism.”⁴⁴ He explains that Mencken turned his attention away from literature late in the decade, and, seeing this, the New Humanists opened a new and highly noticeable attack. Whether Mencken dominated the twenties to the degree Manchester claims is open to question. In any case, Hoeveler gets at more fundamental reasons when he explains that the New Humanism flourished at the end of the twenties

… as a reaction to a decade and more of liberal protest, a vociferous criticism that had been gnawing away at the Puritan moral and classical aesthetic tradition and welcoming a new literature of rebellion. Innovation in the arts and in literature had been riding strong on the wave of aesthetic tolerance and individualism, resulting, in the opinion of many, in a severe loss of critical standards and a meaningless escape from traditional values. From another viewpoint, the decade of the twenties suggested an unprecedented reign of materialism and hedonism in American life.⁴⁵

Whatever the reasons that triggered the Humanist controversy, it peaked in 1930 when Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization, edited by Norman Foerster, appeared. This collection of essays, representing a sort of New Humanist manifesto, was vigorously answered the same year by The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, edited by C. Hartley Grattan. In May three thousand people attended a Carnegie Hall discussion of Humanism by Babbitt, Henry Seidel Canby, and Lewis's good friend Carl Van Doren. Lewis was well aware of these events. Just five days before the debate at Carnegie Hall he wrote to Mencken commending the latter's Treatise on the God: “I am therefore all the gladder that you have done so superior an opus before May 9th when Irving Babbitt will bury you … and me with brief and bitter obsequies.”⁴⁶

Lewis had other reasons for having Babbitt and More on his mind in December 1930. In November, about the time Lewis was preparing his acceptance speech, Babbitt was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, sponsored by More, who had been a member for fifteen years. In addition, the Humanists had been energetic in backing More for the prize Lewis won, and their efforts had significant impact. It is generally forgotten that More was twice considered a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. One of those times was in 1930. Immediately after Lewis received the award, the Swedish critic Knut Hagberg published in the Stockholm newspaper Nya Dagligt Allehana a long essay on More, rebuking the awarding of the Prize to Lewis, whom he called “a noisy savage.” During 1931 and 1932 several of More's essays (including “Modern Currents in American Literature” containing his comments on Lewis) were published in the same newspaper, and two Stockholm houses negotiated to print translations of More's The Greek Tradition.⁴⁷

Although Lewis was much aware of the New Humanism, he obviously did not understand it in any depth. It seems highly unlikely that he had actually read the books of Babbitt and More. What they wrote was simply not the kind of material he was interested in, and he had been prejudiced against them early by his reading of Mencken. D. J. Dooley has correctly pointed out that in his attack on the New Humanism in the Nobel speech, “Lewis ceased to argue from a standpoint of confidence and strength; he pictured himself as bewildered by the movement's subtleties—and his discussion of it demonstrated his inability to comprehend it.”⁴⁸ In the speech, Lewis calls the New Humanism “an astonishing circus,” a “nebulous cult,” a “sect.” He refers to it as “this doctrine of death, this escape from the complexities and dangers of living into the secure blankness of the monastery. …”⁴⁹ This is simply his stock satirical rhetoric, singularly inaccurate applied to men of the stature of Babbitt and More. His using it indicates that he is attacking a myth with the weapons of caricature.

Moreover, as John Tomsich remarks, “Lewis neglected to tell the Swedish Academy about certain cultural developments in America—new publishing houses hospitable to the new literature, experimental little magazines, a more sophisticated reading audience—which had nullified the effects of the institutions he attacked.”⁵⁰ Although the New Humanism was causing a stir in 1930, contrary to Lewis's diagnosis, the institutions that supported and unified traditional values in letters had in reality already lost their force or accommodated themselves to the times. American culture had already moved decisively toward a more pluralistic pattern. Furthermore, Lewis himself accepted membership in the National Institute in 1935 and was elected to the American Academy in 1938. Perhaps he felt the Nobel Prize had made him “respectable.” Perhaps his speech forced the Academy to make some changes. Perhaps his joining was symptomatic of his alleged conservatism after 1930. In any case, by the beginning of the forties he was “an earnest member” (in fact, he was serving on the awards committee) of the institutions he refused to join in 1922 and attacked so ferociously in 1930.⁵¹

If Lewis was so unsympathetically disposed toward the New Humanists that he failed to understand or appreciate them, the reverse, with a few exceptions, was just as true.⁵² Edmund Wilson was largely correct in accusing Babbitt and More of a blind spot regarding contemporary literature. He believed that if they looked closely and honestly they would find that many of the modern writers they condemned shared views similar to their own about the sordidness of American life.⁵³ Babbitt and More were admittedly antagonistic to contemporary literature. Hoeveler finds it difficult even from our vantage point to determine why that antagonism was so strong. He notes how their criticism of current writers was often vague and general, undiscriminating among individual authors, dismissing them all with a wave of the hand. He thinks they were too quick to discern naturalism and romanticism as though this in itself was enough to discredit new efforts.⁵⁴ According to him, Babbitt and More's smug dismissal of contemporary literature was “patently irresponsible.” He finds them culpable on two counts. First, they genuinely believed the Humanist position was capable of improving American life and they had much to offer, but they failed to apply it to the contemporary literary scene. The naturalists and realists deserved a more penetrating critique and did not get it, and those who wondered exactly how a Humanist revival could influence new literary efforts did not get an answer. Second, Babbitt and More read the new literature too narrowly. Had they looked closer and more sympathetically “they might have found elements there of the spiritual struggle and the search for self-perfection that they themselves endorsed.”⁵⁵

Actually, there is no puzzle about Babbitt and More's hostility to writers like Lewis, and Hoeveler may be too quick in placing blame. If literary history has taught us anything, it has taught us that undefined but powerful antagonisms inevitably appear between members of different literary and cultural generations, causing blind spots in even the most intelligent and talented persons. Neither historians nor novelists have given this phenomenon the accurate notice it deserves. The antagonisms can be deep and intense. Usually they are initiated by the younger man, but no doubt they are reciprocal, and the older man, although it is usually his part to keep them out of his consciousness, probably has feelings as strong as his antagonist. On both sides it needs considerable grace to reconcile the differences, or, better, to express them in a way that shall be creditable and even instructive to both. Considering Babbitt's and More's fundamental beliefs and values, it is easy to understand their antipathy to Lewis. Likewise, considering Lewis's temperament and interests, it is easy to understand his failure to find the slightest congeniality with Babbitt and More.

It is unfortunate that the Humanists and the young liberals did not engage in enough useful intellectual exchange. Too often personality and careless generalizing superseded thought and tolerant investigation in the forum of debate. The Humanist critique of modern America was perceptive and provocative and pointed out real weaknesses. Its conservatism and traditionalism afforded insights that the liberals overlooked. Liberal thinkers could have sharpened their axes against the Humanists by replying to their major ideas. And the Humanists could have derived breadth and flexibility from an honest effort to understand new writers. Richard Ruland has noted large areas of agreement beneath the surface of the quarrels and claims the debate “was actually one-tenth contention over what would breathe life into American culture, and nine-tenths fog generated by misunderstanding.” The Humanists and the young insurgents proposed differing diagnoses of and solutions for the problems and the young liberals, according to Ruland, “never realized that when the Humanist said ‘Puritan’ he did not want Malvolio to snatch the cakes and ale, but rather meant to suggest that society could be saved when each individual assumed responsibility for his own salvation.”⁵⁶

Anyone familiar with Lewis's restless and tormented life must feel that some of the Humanists' inner check and moderation could have been a great blessing to him. But it was not to be. Because of temperament, mind-set, generational short-circuiting—whatever the cause of these recurring literary incompatibilities—Lewis and the New Humanists were fated to miss each other's strengths. And this failure perhaps accounts in large measure for the diminishing achievement, recognition, and influence that they experienced after 1930.

Notes

1. Sheldon Grebstein, “Sinclair Lewis and the Nobel Prize,” Western Humanities Review, vol. 13 (1959), p. 165.

2. Charles Fenton, “The American Academy of Arts and Letters vs. All Comers: Literary Rags and Riches in the 1920's,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 58 (1959), pp. 584-85.

3. Sinclair Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature” (Nobel Prize address), in The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader, ed. Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York, 1953), p. 13.

4. Ibid., p. 14.

5. Fenton, p. 578.

6. Martin Light, The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis (West Lafayette, Ind., 1975), p. 24.

7. Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York, 1961), pp. 290-91.

8. William Manchester, H. L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace (New York, 1962), p. 161.

9. Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York, 1955), p. 307n.

10. Manchester, p. 162.

11. Lewis, p. 10.

12. Manchester, p. 52.

13. Schorer, pp. 516-17.

14. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900-1940 (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), p. 3.

15. Austin Warren, “The ‘New Humanism’ Twenty Years After,” Modern Age, vol. 3 (Winter 1958-59), p. 81.

16. Schorer, p. 290.

17. Manchester, p. 65.

18. Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More (Princeton, 1960), p. 193.

19. Ibid., p. 278.

20. Hoeveler, p. 12.

21. Ibid., p. 10.

22. Schorer, p. 482.

23. From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930, ed. Harrison Smith (New York, 1952), p. 100.

24. Manchester, p. 281.

25. Ibid.

26. Schorer, p. 536.

27. Manchester, p. 144.

28. Seward Collins, “Criticism in America: The Origins of a Myth,” Bookman, vol. 71 (1929-30), pp. 241-56.

29. Paul Elmer More, The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton, 1928), pp. 69-70.

30. Irving Babbitt, On Being Creative and Other Essays (Boston, 1932), pp. 218-19.

31. Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings, ed. George A. Panichas (Lincoln, 1981), p. 150.

32. On Being Creative, p. 211.

33. Irving Babbitt, Spanish Character and Other Essays, ed. Frederick Manchester, Rachel Giese, and William F. Giese (Boston, 1940), pp. 218-19.

34. Schorer, p. 382.

35. Hoeveler, p. 152.

36. Schorer, p. 813.

37. Lewis, p. 16.

38. Schorer, p. 292.

39. Ibid., p. 374.

40. Ibid., p. 486.

41. Ibid., p. 490.

42. Manchester, p. 259.

43. Fenton, p. 582.

44. Manchester, p. 259.

45. Hoeveler, p. 27.

46. Schorer, p. 536.

47. Ibid., p. 554; Dakin, pp. 298-99.

48. D. J. Dooley, The Art of Sinclair Lewis (Lincoln, 1967), p. 172.

49. Lewis, pp. 13, 14.

50. John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, 1971), p. 4.

51. Schorer, pp. 681, 709.

52. The principal exception was Stuart Sherman, who, as a member of the Pulitzer Prize committee, recommended Main Street to the American Academy as the best novel in 1921. Lewis's publisher commissioned him to write a pamphlet on Lewis which, according to Schorer, served to “enshrine the subject with solemn academic sanction” (p. 343). He and Lewis remained friends until Sherman drowned in 1926. Although Sherman was the first to popularize the New Humanism and was for a while considered the enfant terrible of the Humanistic circle, his democratic idealism led him away from Babbitt and More. More never liked his democratic leanings or his Menckenite way of going at things. Sherman, a Midwesterner himself, saw the new pessimistic literature, particularly that coming out of the Midwest, as a healthy manifestation of dissatisfaction with America's spiritual limitations. Another exception was Norman Foerster, with whom Lewis corresponded for many years. When Lewis visited Foerster in Iowa in 1940, the latter invited Lewis to teach at the University of Iowa. Lewis was willing but the university president and State Board of Education said no (Ibid., p. 662).

53. Edmund Wilson, “Note on Babbitt and More,” in The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, ed. C. Hartley Grattan (New York, 1930), p. 56.

54. Hoeveler, p. 81.

55. Ibid., pp. 105-6.

56. Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 56.