The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was

image from article: Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson on their wedding day in May 1928 Credit...Smith Archive/Alamy 

By Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

Excerpt:

This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood — novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America. ...

“Main Street,” published late in 1920, exploded on the consciousness of America. There had never been anything like its instant and sustained literary and commercial success. Within months its sales had rocketed past 150,000 (eventually it would sell in the millions), with praise from such sources as Britain’s leading novelist, John Galsworthy (“altogether a brilliant piece of work and characterization”), and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to Lewis, “I want to tell you that ‘Main Street’ has displaced ‘Theron Ware’ in my favor as the best American novel.” “Main Street” was an Event, a Phenomenon — a triumph abroad as well. Sinclair Lewis had arrived! 

In the 1920s he published not only “Main Street” and “Babbitt” but three other novels that won comparable acclaim: “Arrowsmith,” about an idealistic young doctor-scientist; “Elmer Gantry,” a scathing satirical account of evangelism and religion in America — the top fiction best seller of 1927; and “Dodsworth,” about a retired American businessman searching abroad for what he senses he’s missed out on in his life — to me, his best-written and most affecting book and, later, the basis of William Wyler’s brilliant film. (The maddening Mrs. Dodsworth owes much to Gracie, whom he was more or less amicably divorcing.) And then, in 1930, the crowning moment of his career: He became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he understood the implications: “This is the end of me,” his friend Lillian Gish reports him saying. “This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.”

Indeed, from this peak there was only one way to go: down. And down he went, although there was almost uninterrupted commercial success. The highlights were “Ann Vickers” — another account of a high-achieving woman and another novel undermined by its improbable last-minute romantic ending — and the far from subtle “It Can’t Happen Here,” a dystopian take on the career of the rabble-rousing demagogue Huey Long, effective propaganda but hardly Nobel Prize material.

The main event of the 1930s in the life of Sinclair Lewis was his marriage to the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson. They first encountered each other in 1927, at a journalists’ gathering in Berlin. She invited him to her birthday dinner the following night, at which he cornered her and asked her to marry him, and when she turned him down, swore to pursue her until she changed her mind. (That involved trailing her relentlessly around Europe. Arriving in Moscow, where she was covering the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was asked by reporters why he had come to Russia. “To see Dorothy,” he said.) When she finally said yes, they were married in London and spent their honeymoon touring England in an automobile trailer. ... 

In a sketch of himself never published in America, he wrote, “My real traveling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States.” You could say that Sinclair Lewis spent his life taking an inventory of America. 

Robert Gottlieb’s latest book, “Garbo,” was published in December.