Lewis, Sinclair

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Be Militant for at least Once
Characteristic Lewis
5 stars isn't enough
Important Message, Botched Delivery
has it happened yet.... or will it soon?

It Can't Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: NAL Trade
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 045121658X

Book Description

The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press. Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news.

Customer Reviews:

Be Militant for at least Once.......2007-05-07

Lee Roscoe has recently (© 2005) adapted Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here to the stage. This play is a militant agitprop work and is available to people who want to produce it for an audience in a militant perspective to fight against the present erring developments of Bush's presidency and to advocate the necessity to impeach him and his vice-president as the last defense against their systematic attack on the Constitution, hence the American people and the World's population. This enables us to rediscover the plot imagined by Sinclair Lewis in the mid 30s who was afraid of the possibility for a populist candidate to become President of the US and lead the country to some kind of fascist dictatorship. Apparently this fear is being revived in the world, or rather in some countries by the war on terror launched by President Bush and that has brought some fairly frightening developments against basic civil rights: the possibility for the police to know what you borrow or check in and out in public libraries and the restriction under which the librarian is not to tell you about it; the negation of habeas corpus for a whole set of people who have been imprisoned in Guantanamo for years without any basic constitutional or plainly universally recognized rights like the possibility to communicate with the outside world, the right to have a lawyer, the right to be informed about the charges that are leveled at them, the right to be tried in a normal court in due time and following proper procedures, etc (the procedure is so unbelievably wrong that quite a few of these prisoners have been released without any charges after several years of detention amounting to so many years of suffering, social cultural or professional damage, and even psychological torturing, and no damages, compensation or reparation when released); and of course the normal reaction of some American people who believed what they were told and started leveling harsh words at opponents and even at times taking harsh measures against opponents. The text of this play is being circulated on the Internet. The same mindset is developing in other countries, like for instance in France where some consider that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy for instance is leading to the same kind of mechanism that will necessarily lead to a police state if not fascism.
The process imagined by Sinclair Lewis is simple: a populist elected candidate and the defense of the absolute freedom of all markets to liberate the creative energy of capitalism and get us out of all possible crises. This will lead to work camps for unemployed people; the ruin of all independent newspapers and the hunting down of all alternative expression and media as unpatriotic if not anti-patriotic; the ruin of all businesses that do not support the policy of the President; the creation of some kind of militia to keep an eye on everyone; the increase of the powers of this militia that would have authority over all other police forces and even over justice. Of course one of the first triggering elements this President would need is some menace from a foreign country, hence a war against this menacing country, be it true or imagined, and a designated accomplice inside the country defined as anarchist, communist or terrorist. And the old world is then perverted enough for fascism to be born in the very sanctuary of human rights and civil liberties, and then "M and M" becomes Militia Man.
It is interesting to see this revival. It reveals several elements that we must keep in mind if we want to understand what is happening in the world. People are really afraid of the future in this changing world. People are afraid of change because it precisely is change and comfort means no change.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

Characteristic Lewis.......2007-04-10

As other reviews here have stated, this is not a subtle book. Anyone familiar with Lewis's other works will have no problem recognizing him here: he is heavy-handed and obvious, his writing is ham-fisted and clunkey.

But the book works, for the same reasons his more well known books works. Lewis has a fantastic ear for language and tone. His satire is always spot-on. Sure, his characters are exaggerated to the point of being caricatures, but the kernal of truth is always there amid the hyperbole.

It's not Babbit or Main Street, but a good read for Lewis fans.

5 stars isn't enough.......2007-02-20

While the time isn't clear -- I'd guess shortly after WWII -- it is mandatory reading for anyone who worries about the loss of individual liberties in the US, as well as movement to a "security state", written long before current concerns.

Important Message, Botched Delivery.......2007-02-14

I was drawn to this book by a quote from it I had read: "When fascism comes to America, it will be draped in the flag and carrying a bible." Strong and provocative stuff, no? I wondered why I had never encountered this book before, and why it is not better known. It turns out there is a good reason, and that is because the book is virtually unreadable--apart from that one quotation, apparently.

Lewis's premise is that fascism could establish itself in America with relative ease if the country is sufficiently worried about some threat--in this case, the great depression. The book's ironic title comes up in slightly varied forms in several early conversations. The clear implication is that it certainly could happen here, "it" being the consolidation of power in the hands of a demagogue who offers relief and protection to a frightened nation.

But the path Lewis takes in making this important point is exasperating beyond words. We first must get to know a small-town newspaper editor and his whole tedious family, and attend cocktail parties and picnics with him, and learn that his hired man won't do as he's told around the garden, and on and on. It's as if you know a person has desperately important news that you want to hear, but you must first allow him to recount, in detail, how his business is doing, and what a splash his daughter made at her ballet recital. I gave up on the book after 60 pages or so.

What decided me in the end was a growing conviction that Lewis himself didn't take his subject seriously. The novel's villainous demagogue is named Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip; he becomes President. His bible-thumping supporter is Paul Peter Prang, and the rational small-town journalist is Doremus Jessup--Doremouse to his wife.

I submit that no one who intends to write a serious novel about his country's descent into fascism would choose such cartoonish names for any of his characters, let alone the main ones. Such flippancy causes readers to smile at things that should be frightening and disturbing. It also comforts them with the false assurance that any potential dictator would be immediately recognizable by his outlandish pronouncements or at least would be ridiculous in some way.

It would have been more effective by far to give evil a bland, friendly face, as Orwell did in "1984," and to give the villain a common, ordinary name such as might belong to the fellow across the street. A name like, oh, I don't know--you think one up.

has it happened yet.... or will it soon?.......2006-09-25

" Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize For Literature, wrote this satirical political novel in 1935, a time when the United States and Western Europe had been in a depression for six years. In this novel, Sinclair Lewis asks the question - what if some ambitious politician would use the 1936 presidential election to make himself dictator by promising quick, easy solutions to the depression - just as Hitler had done in Germany in 1933."
As frightening and politically current today as it was then...

Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth (Library of America)

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Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth (Library of America)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1931082081
Release Date: 2002-08-22

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As the son and grandson of physicians, Sinclair Lewis had a store of experiences and imparted knowledge to draw upon for Arrowsmith.Published in 1925, after three years of anticipation, the book follows the life of Martin Arrowsmith, a rather ordinary fellow who gets his first taste of medicine at 14 as an assistant to the drunken physician in his home town. It is Leora Tozer who makes Martin's life extraordinary. With vitality and love, she urges him beyond the confines of the mundane to risk answering his true calling as a scientist and researcher. Not even her tragic death can extinguish her spirit or her impact on Martin's life.

Book Description

Written at the height of his powers in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the vigorous unmasking of American middle-class life begun by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Babbitt. In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis portrays the medical career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the cynicism and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island.

Elmer Gantry (1927) aroused intense controversy with its brutal depiction of a hypocritical preacher in relentless pursuit of worldly pleasure and power. Through his satiric exposé of American religion, Lewis captured the growing cultural and political tension in the 1920s between the forces of secularism and fundamentalism.

Dodsworth (1929) follows Sam Dodsworth, a wealthy, retired Midwestern automobile manufacturer, as he travels through Europe with his increasingly restless wife, Fran. The novel intimately explores the unraveling of their marriage, while pitting the proud heritage of European culture against the rude vigor of American commercialism.

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This concise supplement to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith helps students understand the overall structure of the work, actions and motivations of the characters, and the social and cultural perspectives of the author.

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Elmer Gantry (Signet Classics)
Sinclair Lewis , and Mark Schorer
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0451522516

Lewis: Main Street and Babbitt (Library of America)

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Lewis: Main Street and Babbitt (Library of America)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Library of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0940450615

Book Description

Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to explore middle-class life in America as no writer had done before. These remarkable novels combine biting satire with an lingering affection for the men and women who, as he wrote of Babbitt, want to "seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late." "Main Street" was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history; it is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her Midwestern community where the romance of the frontier has dwindled to drab reality. "He is America incarnate, exuberant and exqusite," H.L. Mencken said of George Babbitt. With this boisterous, vulgar, gadget-loving real estate man, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature, the total conformist--and captured the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture.

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Down On "Main Street"
not for me
We All Live in Our Small Towns!
Perceptive view into American culture and accepted tyrrany
flawed, but a welcome antidote for nostalgia

Main Street (Signet Classics)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0451526821

Book Description

In this classic satire of small-town America, beautiful young Carol Kennicott comes to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with dreams of transforming the provincial old town into a place of beauty and culture. But she runs into a wall of bigotry, hypocrisy and complacency. Main Street established Lewis as a major American novelist.

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The first mainstream book to attack conventional ideas about marriage, gender roles, and small town life, "Main Street" established Lewis as a major American novelist.

Customer Reviews:

Down On "Main Street".......2007-04-16

"Is it really my failure, or theirs?"

Carol Kennicott asks herself this question nearly 250 pages into "Main Street," regarding her impossible relations with the residents of the town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. By this time, I was asking a similar question: "Is it really my failure, or Sinclair Lewis's?"

"Main Street" seemed a good idea as it sat on my shelf. Touted as a satirical look at middle-class America, it was Lewis's first successful novel, ushering in a new era upon its publication in 1920, and breaking critical ground for the Golden Age of American Literature, of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. How could I go wrong picking it up?

The book tells the interminable story of Mrs. Kennicott, who marries a country doctor while imagining herself an improving influence on his as-yet-unseen town of Gopher Prairie. Imagine her surprise when she is greeted not as a liberator but grist for the gossip mill, with her Big City ideas and lack of churchiness.

Carol's alternating turns of resistance and acceptance are about the sum total of this plotless book. Lewis's descriptive powers are much in evidence, and you find yourself trapped in G.P. as much as Carol, his descriptions of noisy neighbors and smug dinner parties bearing the unmistakable imprint of someone who grew up in small-town Minnesota and knew of what he wrote. The problem, when you get past the period slang and the barbed commentary, is that the subjects of Lewis's satire are so miserable and nasty you can't understand why Carol thinks she can change them, except perhaps with the idea nature couldn't possibly create people as one-dimensional as those found here.

I thought I'd never read a duller work about small-town Americana from the early 20th century than Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." My apologies, Thornton. "Main Street" is as down on the same locale that "Our Town" exults, only Lewis lays on derision with a dripping trowel. Wilder, by contrast, seems almost surgical in the delicacy with which he makes his points. Lewis makes sure that when he presents us with the atheistic radical Miles Bjornstam, he is not only a voice of reason and affability to Carol but ultimately run out of town for his beliefs on the heels of having suffered a great tragedy, just in case we didn't otherwise get how miserable a town Carol is stuck in.

"And you want to reform people like that when dynamite is so cheap?" Carol fumes early on.

There is one effective section in the book, when Carol first discovers how isolated she has become and feels the "moist, fleering eyes" of prying neighbors so powerfully she draws down her window shades. Passages with her husband, the stolid, straying, but not worthless Dr. Kennicott, present some desperately-needed ambiguity.

But the book just keeps going, hammering home the same points, before winding down with an ending that feels more like a cop-out, in which the still-radical but more placid Carol settles for the status quo while imagining her sleeping infant daughter as "a bomb to blow up smugness." Polemics can produce great writing, but seldom great literature, and "Main Street" is a case in point.

The Signet Classic edition from 1998 features an introduction by Thomas Mallon which was the most enjoyable part of the book, candidly pointing out the book's faults but arguing for its continued value, as it imagines Carol's experience being like that of a young Hillary Rodham first arriving in Little Rock. Suffice to say I had a lot more fun reading it than I did the rest of this book.

not for me.......2007-01-06

I didn't care for this novel. I thought that the book had too much needless, useless information. I didn't care for the long winded descriptions and explanations, they didn't lend anything to the story. I also thought that the characters seemed one dimensional. All of the characters seemed like little molded toys and not real people. On the positive side, I got to look at a small midwestern town during this time period.

We All Live in Our Small Towns!.......2006-12-29

Obviously the protagonist Carol wants more to life in Gopher Prairie. She wants culture and intelligence and witty conversations. Of course where can you find that now without paying a price. Even in the urban cities lies problems beneath the surface, I think Carol should learn to appreciate what she has much like the author who despised small town America. If you come from a small town, it does not mean that your mind is small. Of course, most people travel around the world seeking a utopia or paradise to call home. Carol represents the author's resentment and hatred toward his hometown. I thought it was funny that the author wanted a Pulitzer when he would receive literary's highest honor of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the first American to receive such an honor. Oh well, be grateful what you have and remember the grass may not be as greener on the other side.

Perceptive view into American culture and accepted tyrrany.......2006-11-16

While reading this novel you will be caught off guard by the relevancy of Sinclair Lewis's insights into the priorities and caste system of the typical American small town and it's surprising relevance to current American surburbia. Fantastic novel that needs more attention!

flawed, but a welcome antidote for nostalgia.......2006-10-12

This book is different from some of Lewis's other books in a couple of important respects.

On the positive side, this book is more of a "message" book than Babbitt or It Can't Happen Here. Babbitt is as much a character study as a social satire, and It Can't Happen Here is a fantasy.

This book, by contrast, goes after the dull reality of small-town life in WW I America. It has an eternal message: that the combination of (1) a close-knit community and (2) people with more spare time than sophistication leads to (3) a dull place dominated by malicious gossip spread by people with too much time on their hands.

In addition, Lewis's description of the dullness of the small towns themselves foreshadows the dullness of today's suburbs. Today, some people (including me) imagine the small towns of the past as like Walt Disney's Main Street- tiny, tidy, beautiful. But some of Lewis's quotes about Main Street could apply to today's sprawl:

"It was not only the unsparing, unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelemed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. . . Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others." (p. 43)

"Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to the other . . . The shops show the same standardized nationally advertised wares . . . If Kennecott was snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed to a town leagues away he would not realize it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called Main Street) in the same drug store he would see the same young man serving the same ice cream soda to the same young woman with the same magazine and phonograph records under her arm." (pp. 311-12)

On the negative side, this book is not quite as easy to read as Babbitt or It Can't Happen Here- probably because the characters are not as vivid or as interesting. The unsympathetic characters are mere stereotypes, not obnoxious enough to be interesting. The sympathetic characters are not that likable.

Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics)

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Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Barnes & Noble Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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Winesburg, Ohio (Bantam Classic)

ASIN: 1593080360

Book Description

“This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves.” So Sinclair Lewis—recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer—prefaces his novel Main Street. Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self-satisfied inhabitants of small-town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty.

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Babbitt (Bantam Classics)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Bantam Classics
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ASIN: 0553214861

Book Description

Following the critical and commercial success of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis directed his barbs at the American businessman in Babbitt. The central character, George Follansbee Babbitt, is a middle-aged realtor living in Zenith, the Zip City. He is unimaginative, self-important, and hopelessly middle class. Vaguely dissatisfied with his position, he tries to alter the pattern of his life by flirting with liberalism and by having an affair with an attractive widow, only to find that his dread of ostracism is greater than his desire for escape. He does, however, encourage the rebellion of his son, Ted. Lewis's seventh novel defined an American type and gave the language a name for the smug person who readily conforms to middle class standards and conventions.

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George E. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts with other women, and patronizes the less successful. But when his best friend is sent to prison for killing his wife, Babbitt's middle-class complacency is shattered, and he rebels, seeking a more "meaningful" life. His small revolt is quickly defeated, however, by public opinion and his own need for acceptance. Babbitt captures the flavor of America during the economic boom years of the 1920s, and its protagonist has become the symbol of middle-class mediocrity, his name an enduring part of the American lexicon.

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Bethel Merriday
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Doubleday Doran
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000CIR4WC

Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (Rep)

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Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (Rep)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Thirteen stories selected by Lewis himself which illustrate the wide range of his art and interests. Without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. --Mark Schorer

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Babbitt (Dover Thrift Editions)
Sinclair Lewis
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Ragged Dick: Or Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (Signet Classics)

ASIN: 0486431673

Book Description

Prosperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything. But when a personal crisis forces the middle-aged real estate agent to reexamine his life, Babbitt mounts a rebellion that jeopardizes everything he values. Widely considered Sinclair Lewis' greatest novel, this satire remains an ever-relevant tale of an individual caught in the machinery of modern life.

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