Is Main Street primarily a novel about Carol Kennicott or about Gopher Prairie?

Is Sinclair Lewis’s characterization of George Babbitt thoroughly satirical, or does Babbitt have dimensions that encourage the reader to view him sympathetically?

Is Martin Arrowsmith as convincing a character as George Babbitt or Carol Kennicott?

What descriptive techniques contribute to the success of Lewis’s depiction of village and small-town settings?

The title of one book about Lewis refers to his “quixotic vision.” What does this phrase mean, and what in Lewis’s novels justifies its application to him?

Lewis was the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Did he deserve it?

Sinclair Lewis started writing regularly during his freshman year at Yale University. His stories and poems imitating the manner of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine. His short stories began to appear in 1915 in The Saturday Evening Post. In 1934, Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts was produced, and in 1935, Harcourt, Brace published the Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis. During his lifetime, there were numerous stage and screen adaptations of many of his novels. The year after Lewis’s death, Harcourt, Brace published From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930, containing the novelist’s correspondence with that publisher. In 1953, his miscellaneous writings appeared as The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904-1950.

In 1930, Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first U.S. citizen so honored. He acknowledged in his acceptance address that the Swedish Academy honored American literature with this prize. By awarding it to the novelist who not only added the term “Babbitt” to the American language but also enriched the European vocabulary with his “Main Street,” Europe acknowledged America’s coming-of-age. There may have been a touch of condescension in the academy’s choice; the image of America that Lewis projected seemed to reinforce the European perception of the United States as a dollar-hunting, materialistic country, alien to cultural refinement.

Lewis’s road to fame was stormy. He wrote five novels before he achieved his first big success with Main Street in 1920. Critics were divided: The Dial neglected his books, and academic critics Fred L. Pattee and Irving Babbitt rejected him, but, at the peak of Lewis’s career, Vernon F. Parrington, T. K. Whipple, Constance Rourke, Walter Lippman, and Lewis Mumford acknowledged his strengths as a writer despite some reservations. H. L. Mencken enthusiastically supported him. English writers paid him tribute; among them were E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Hugh Walpole, and John Galsworthy. They were joined by such fellow American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vachel Lindsay. Lewis himself was generous with others; he helped young writers such as Thomas Wolfe and was quick to praise novelists of his own generation.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which came to be called “The American Fear of Literature,” Lewis repudiated the genteel tradition, in which he included William Dean Howells, and praised Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and a score of younger writers. Like all his writings, this speech was regarded as controversial.

Each novel renewed the controversy. Some considered him unworthy of the attention and overrated, others denounced his aggressive criticism of American life, but after Arrowsmith he received favorable recognition even in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and The Literary Review . Indeed, his popularity in the United States reached unprecedented levels. In one decade, with the help of Harcourt, Brace, he became the...