characterization. Do the people in the novel exhibit more than a single side, or are they so inhumanly consistent that they become stereotypes? With a few exceptions, it is in this area of his work that Lewis may be faulted. Granted, this is the pitfall of the genre—satire—and Lewis based his characters on models he observed in his society. Nevertheless, taking only the photographer’s view of his subjects detracts in some cases from the verisimilitude. As critic Geoffrey Moore put it, “Lewis’s method was to choose an institution or a class of people, decide on a point of view, and then flatten his characters into the mould he desired. . . . [t]here is no ’innerness.’” When Lewis does go beyond this tendency toward a journalistic style, however, as he does with Carol Kennicott inMain Street, Max Gottlieb and Martin Arrowsmith in Arrowsmith, and a few other of his creations, he avoids completely the charge of creating caricatures.

Lewis can certainly be seen as a critic of the era in which he wrote his best novels, but he was no reformer; he does not suggest solutions. In the manner of some European novelists, such as Émile Zola, he merely points out, through satire, what he sees.

Main Street

First published: 1920

Type of work: Novel

A young, idealistic bride tries unsuccessfully to alter life in a small midwestern town circa 1920.

Carol Milford, an attractive, eager librarian, marries Dr. Will Kennicott and comes to Gopher Prairie with every expectation of seeing the town through her husband’s eyes. Will, a character based to a great extent on the novelist’s father and brother Claude, both country doctors, is proud of Gopher Prairie and does not see clearly the faults which become so apparent to Carol almost at once. Carol Kennicott would like to change everything, from the dull buildings that line Main Street to the people who inhabit the houses, people whose interests in life are very narrow indeed. Will’s friends assume that Carol will “settle in” and embrace their values, and when she does not do so, they are quite disturbed.

Lewis constantly emphasizes the freedom of the countryside surrounding the town, so that nature, even in the midst of stormy winter, is preferable to the stultifying atmosphere of Gopher Prairie. Some of Carol’s happiest times are spent with her husband, tramping through the area, appreciating nature.

She tries various plans to “raise the cultural level” of the town. She gives well-planned parties, instead of the usual dull ones that seem to her to be funereal. She offers to use her skills as a librarian to upgrade The Thanatopsis, a ladies’ literary discussion group which specializes in brief summaries of the lives of great literary figures; she organizes a drama club to produce plays of more lasting merit than The Girl from Kankakee. She consistently fails.

Furthermore, she finds that even in Gopher Prairie, a village of about four thousand souls, there are strict notions of “social class,” prejudice against the Swedish and German immigrants, rigid notions about morals, anti-union feeling, an avid love of gossiping, and, above all, a sense of unremitting dullness.

Carol does find a few friends. There is Guy Pollock, a lawyer who at first seems to share her views of Gopher Prairie. There is her hired girl, Bea Sorenson, a young Swedish farm girl who (by contrasting it with Scandia Crossing, population sixty-seven) looks at Gopher Prairie as a big city. There is the town outcast, Miles Bjornstain, an independent “Red Swede” who marries Bea. There is Erik Valborg, a would-be artist/designer who works as a presser in a local tailor shop, and there is Fern Mullins, a young schoolteacher.

Yet each friendship comes to naught. Guy confesses that “village virus” has infected him even unto death; Miles loses his beloved Bea and their little son, Olaf, to death and leaves his farm to travel west; Erik becomes a small-time film actor; and Fern Mullins is forced to resign from school and is run out of town on a trumped-up morals charge based entirely on malicious gossip.

The Kennicotts have a son, Hugh, and for a while the child fills Carol’s life; however, even after she and Will have had an extended vacation in California, she finds that life in Gopher Prairie is intolerable. In addition to the faults Carol has found from the beginning, the town has succumbed to the new “booster” mentality, which has raised the price of land but has not raised the level of everyday life one iota.

With her husband’s reluctant approval, Carol and Hugh go to live in Washington, D.C., where she gets a job in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. It is a first step toward her independence, but she finds a “thick streak of Main Street” even there. After a year, her husband comes to Washington; they take a short trip south, which Will calls a “second wooing,” and five months later, Carol decides to return to Gopher Prairie, pregnant with her daughter and determined to continue “the good fight.”

Lewis leaves little doubt about his opinion of Gopher Prairie and its faults, but the reader also sees that although Carol has good intentions from the beginning, she is not really focused on what changes she wants to make. She is somewhat immature. Perhaps her character represents the American woman of the postwar period searching for her role in a radically changed society. It is only after she has lived in Washington and had contact with the suffragists that she begins to define herself as an individual. Her speech to Will at the end of the book is quite prophetic. She takes him to look at their sleeping baby daughter and says:Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It’s a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn’t arrest anarchists; you’d arrest all these children while they’re asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars.

Dr. Will Kennicott seems sometimes to be a father figure to Carol. He loves her deeply and is more than patient with her peccadilloes. He is a good doctor, but he sees no romance in his profession; he has accepted some of the less attractive qualities of Gopher Prairie, such as the notion of social classes, as shown in his disapproval of having Carol take Hugh to visit Bea and Miles to play with their son, Olaf. He is somewhat interested in making money to secure their future; he is also completely honest, basically kind, and thoroughly loyal. Most of the other inhabitants of Gopher Prairie are not particularly memorable. They are, for the most part, types rather than distinctly drawn individuals.

The fact that Lewis has put Jim Blausser, the publicity person hired for the booster campaign, so near the end of the novel is significant. This huckster exaggerates everything from the genuine natural beauty to be found in the local countryside to the new “White Way” which is now to be found on Main Street. He assures the citizens that their town can easily expect to become a city of 200,000 and a manufacturing center very soon. As Carol Kennicott wryly comments, “There’s where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie.” Lewis is foreshadowing next stage in the development of Main Street as he takes it to the city of Zenith, the locale of his next novel.

Babbitt

First published: 1922

Type of work: Novel

George F. Babbitt, representing the new middle class, depends on material possessions and conformity to validate his existence.

Rebecca West, in her 1922 essay “Babbitt,” makes a statement that encapsulates Lewis’s attitude toward the world of his novel Babitt: “To write satire . . . one must hate the world so much that one’s hatred strikes sparks, but one must hate it only because it disappoints one’s invincible love of it.”

This statement also illustrates strikingly the novelist’s disappointment in its protagonist, Babbitt. Here is a man with a dim perception that what he has accepted as the “good life” is not entirely satisfying; yet he lacks the power to do more than dream of the “fairy child” who beckons him to a better way. For Lewis, George F. Babbitt is the Everyman of his time.

In the real estate business with his father-in-law, Babbitt has convinced himself that he is indispensable as a facilitator. He does not think himself dishonest when he “puts over a deal” whereby a client receives information about a piece of property before the seller is aware of its increased value. He loves his wife, Myra, and their three children, but it is only in times of crisis that he gives them an honest thought. Supposedly a graduate of the state university, Babbitt is really quite ignorant, and in the “poetry” created by one of his fellow Boosters Lewis has created a hilarious put-down of popular taste in the arts through the verses of T. Cholmondeley Frink, who also writes “Ads, that Add.”

George Babbitt thinks that he has many friends, whereas in reality he has but one, Paul Reisling, and it is with Paul on a few days vacation in the Maine woods th Babbitt finds his only true happiness. It is the closeness of a friendship that temporarily frees Babbitt from his boring life in Zenith, but this scene serves also as the author’s insistence that nature has a salutary effect on all human beings, even the silliest. Paul’s wife, Zilla, is a vindictive shrew who finally frustrates her husband to the point of shooting her in the shoulder. In all sincerity, Babbitt goes to Paul’s lawyer in an offer to concoct a story to make the crime seem less deliberate, but his suggestion is refused, and Paul goes to state prison for three years. George misses him sorely.

At this time George’s wife, Myra Babbitt, and her youngest child, Tinka, go East to visit relatives, leaving only George, his daughter Verona, and his son, Ted. Busy with their own lives, the young people are unconcerned and do little to assuage George’s loneliness. His group at the Athletic Club is no help, and he begins to think of female companionship as a viable option. After Babbitt has been further depressed by a visit to Paul in prison, he makes several timorous attempts at flirting with his neighbor’s wife and with a young manicurist. Both these women rebuff him, but an attractive widow, Tanis Judique, accepts his attentions after he has found her “just the right apartment.”

He feels guilty about his affair and anxious about his activities, which include drinking and partying with “the Bunch,” a group of Tanis’s friends who consider themselves urbane bohemians. He does not stop being “Old Georgie,” however, until his wife requires surgery. Meanwhile, Zenith is torn by a strike which divides the city into factions and finds Babbitt confused. He wants to believe that Seneca Doane and the other liberals supporting the strikers have their rights, but he is afraid that those who characterize them as “dirty socialists” will censure him, and he gives in to his fear.

His former friends, the respectable members of the Athletic Club, have formed a Good Citizens League—with all the characteristics of the Ku Klux Klan, minus the white hoods—and George is urged (even mildly threatened) to join. He resists briefly; then agrees with Vergil Grunch that he is being foolish, and within two weeks he is bellicose regarding the wickedness of Seneca Doane, the crimes of labor unions, and the perils of immigration. Babbitt also returns to the Boosters’ Club, the church, and the Elks, and his father-in-law announces that their business is back to where it was before George’s brief rebellion.

Lewis does, however, allow him one saving act. His son, Ted, has married the girl next door, much to the consternation of her parents. Furthermore, the boy has decided to skip college and work as a mechanic, and it is George Babbitt who tells him, “[d]on’t be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours!”

Arrowsmith

First published: 1925

Type of work: Novel

An idealistic doctor finds his life’s work in research.

In this novel, Lewis’s protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, is much more fully developed—more of a three-dimensional person—than are the characters in his earlier books. From the first, when he is shown as an adolescent, Martin makes mistakes; he is not always the perfect hero. He is, in fact, recognizably human.

The locale (Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac) represents Lewis’s midwestern roots. There is the inevitable Main Street and the feeling of transition from rural life to that of a small town; there is also the alcoholic Doc Vickerson, who encourages the fourteen-year-old Martin to “study medicine, go to Zenith, and make money.”

Martin goes to the state university as a medical student and has a professor, Dr. Max Gottlieb, who is to influence significantly the rest of his life. He also meets a number of other students who continue as characters throughout the novel. There is Ira Hinkley, the future medical missionary, Angus Duer, the future surgeon, and Clif Clawson, the practical joker, whose dismissal from medical school and subsequent appearance as an automobile salesman give Lewis a fine chance to satirize hucksterism. At this point Martin also meets the love of his life, Leora Tozer, a young nursing student.

As Dr. Gottlieb’s assistant, Martin is becoming very interested in the research area of medicine, but he makes a mistake, argues with Gottlieb, and after a night drinking, tells Dean Silva that he will not apologize, so he is suspended from the university. With little sense of direction, and a lot of drinking, Martin actually becomes a hobo, but he finally heads west to Leora, who has returned to her hometown at her parents’ insistence. Her family opposes their marriage, but they elope, and the Tozers must accept it.

In the flush of graduation and a decision to set up practice in Wheatsylvania (Leora’s hometown), Martin’s devotion to research (and to Max Gottlieb) is temporarily forgotten. Gottlieb has been discharged from the hospital; his wife is ill, and the doctor is nearly at his wit’s end when he is offered a position at a pharmaceutical firm, formerly a target of his scorn. From this time on, Arrowsmith deals largely with the commercial exploitation of scientific findings versus the need for pure research.

When Gottlieb refuses to turn his incomplete research into a salable product, he is fired from Hunziker Pharmaceutical, but he finds a place at the McGurk Institute almost immediately. Lewis criticizes the politics common at such institutions, based on Paul de Kruif’s actual experience at the Rockefeller Institute.

Bored with his small-town practice, Martin obtains a position as second-in-command to the director of public health, Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, in Nautilus, Iowa, and becomes director himself after Pickerbaugh is elected to Congress, but his role there is short-lived. Next, he obtains a position at Rouncefield Clinic in Chicago, through Angus Duer, and changes his goal of becoming a researcher to becoming a material success. He does qualify this new ambition by thinking that after he has made enough money, he will be able to have his own laboratory. Nevertheless, Lewis makes him very believable in his desire to be a monetary success rather than a man dedicated to pure science who is frustrated at every turn by those holding the purse strings.

A paper published by Martin reaches Gottlieb, who then invites him to McGurk, and the two are reconciled. All goes well despite the factions at the institute. Then the bombshell hits: Martin has been working tirelessly and has made a significant discovery. Those in power, eager to enhance the reputation of the institute, want to make the research public at once. Finally, with Sondelius and Terry Wickett, Martin is able to work on an antidote for bubonic plague just when such a plague is breaking out in the West Indies. Sondelius, Martin, and Leora, who insists on going along, will represent the McGurk Institute, while Gottlieb has been made the director in New York.

Dr. Ira Hinkley, now a medical missionary in the West Indies, returns to the cast of the novel as he tries to thwart Martin’s work by lying about Martin’s days at Winnemac and by referring to the plague as “the wrath of God.” Martin, however, continues his mission and succeeds, although both Sondelius and Leora die. Martin is devastated and returns to New York, little comforted by the success of his research. Max is no longer director of McGurk, and once more there is a conflict between Martin and the new director, who wants immediate publication to glorify the reputation of the institute.

In due time Martin decides to remarry, this time to a wealthy socialite, Joyce Lanyon, whom he had met briefly in the Islands. The marriage does not work out, however, despite the couple’s having a son. Joyce is not unsympathetic to his work, but she is not the ever-patient Leora, who truly understood that science was Martin’s first love, his true passion.

Finally Martin decides to refuse the directorship at McGurk, to get a divorce from Joyce, and to defect to Terry Wickett and a simple life in the woods, dedicated to pure scientific research. It is the most romanticized ending of the four Lewis novels discussed, representing Lewis’s rather naïve notion regarding a person in a natural setting, in the tradition of Huck Finn. In this same sense, it shows Martin as an eager adolescent akin to George Babbitt when he takes his vacation in the Maine woods with Paul, his one true friend.

Elmer Gantry

First published: 1927

Type of work: Novel

A completely evil man uses evangelical religion as his road to undeserved success.

In this novel, Lewis’s satire is unrelieved, beginning with his first description of Terwillinger College on the outskirts of Gritzmacher Springs, Kansas, where Elmer (nicknamed Hell-cat) Gantry is wasting his time and his mother’s money pretending to get an education.

Elmer meets Judson Roberts, a preacher, and is beginning to consider a career as an evangelical minister when he is pushed into the position of leading a crowd to exhort God. Because his original plan to become a lawyer would have required study, it is easy for him to change his vocational goal, but he needs to “get a Call.” This he fakes, with the help of some whiskey, and he is on his way.

At Mizpah Theological Seminary, near Zenith, he meets Frank Shallard (one of the few decent characters in the novel), with whom Elmer shares a part-time assignment at a small country church. Always extremely interested in sex, Elmer cannot resist seducing Lulu Bains, virginal daughter of the deacon, but when the girl begins to talk of marriage, Elmer devises a scheme to marry her off to Floyd Naylor, claiming her infidelity. For this, he is rewarded with a larger church in Monarch.

Unable to reach the deacon when he arrives, Elmer falls in with some salesmen, gets drunk, and forgets the Easter service completely. Summarily dismissed, and no longer a reverend, he becomes a salesman himself for the next two years. Although he is quite successful and enjoys the freedom to drink and womanize, Elmer misses the adulation he had as a preacher, so he becomes the assistant of an evangelist, Sharon Falconer, hoping to share the profits of her well-organized group.

Although Sharon remains “in charge,” Elmer does well until Sharon is killed in the fire which destroys the new tabernacle they have built. Elmer becomes a Methodist, marries Cleo Benham with an eye to promotion, and becomes a minister in Zenith, where he meets Frank Shallard again. An influential parishioner, T. J. Riggs, helps Elmer mount a phony anti-vice crusade. The publicity results in standing-room-only crowds, but Elmer’s greed is not satisfied. He wants a very rich parishioner to leave Frank’s church for his; as a result of his plotting, Frank is branded an infidel, loses his pulpit, and eventually is taken for a 1920’s-style “ride” when he gives a lecture titled “Are Fundamentalists Witch Hunters?” at the Zenith Charity Organization.

Elmer now has his new church and is accorded a doctorate of divinity; his services are being broadcast by radio. All should be well, but once more his lust gets him into trouble. He needs a new secretary, and the sexy Hettie Dowler seems an answer to his prayer. He gets rid of Lulu and begins an affair with Hettie. One evening, however, the two are interrupted by Hettie’s husband, Oscar, who produces a gun and threatens suit for alienation of affections. He wants fifty thousand dollars but will settle for ten thousand in cash. As Elmer turns back to Hettie, he realizes that she is in on the scam—for once, the great pretender seems to be the loser.

T. J. Riggs, however, comes through with a private detective who checks out the Dowlers; as a result of what he finds, they are glad to leave town with two hundred dollars, but not before they have signed a sworn statement describing Elmer as a Christian saint. He receives telegrams giving him a large church in New York and appointing him head of Napap, an organization formed to protect American morals. His congregation reassures him with a loud hallelujah, as he prays aloud: “Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation,” as he eyes with appreciation the new member of the choir, “a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes.” It is quite clear why Elmer Gantry infuriated clergy of every denomination and their parishioners as well.