Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [238]
—July 14, 1921
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
The texture of the prose written by Mr. Lewis gives one but faint joy and one cannot escape the conviction that for some reason Lewis has himself found but little joy, either in life among us or in his own effort to channel his reactions to our life into prose. There can be no doubt that this man, with his sharp journalistic nose for news of the outer surface of our lives, has found out a lot of things about us and the way we live in our towns and cities, but I am very sure that in the life of every man, woman and child in the country there are forces at work that seem to have escaped the notice of Mr. Lewis. Ring Lardner has seen them and in his writing there is sometimes real laughter, but one has the feeling that Lewis never laughs at all, that he is in an odd way too serious about something to laugh.
For after all, even in Gopher Prairie or in Indianapolis, Indiana, boys go swimming in the creeks on summer afternoons, shadows play at evening on factory walls, old men dig anglevirorms and go fishing together, love comes to at least a few of the men and women and, everything else failing, the baseball club comes from a neighboring town and Tom Robinson gets a home run. That’s something.... Reading Sinclair Lewis, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that here is a man writing who, wanting passionately to love the life about him, cannot bring himself to do so, and who wanting perhaps to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold.
And is it not just this sense of dreary spiritual death in the man’s work that is making it so widely read? To one who is himself afraid to live there is, I am sure, a kind of inverted joy in seeing other men as dead. In my own feeling for the man from whose pen has come all of this prose over which there are so few lights and shades, I have come at last to sense, most of all, the man fighting terrifically and ineffectually for a thing about which he really does care. There is a kind of fighter living inside Sinclair Lewis and there is, even in this dull, unlighted prose of his, a kind of dawn coming. In the dreary ocean of this prose, islands begin to appear.
—from The New Republic (October 11, 1922)
Questions
1. Sherwood Anderson described Lewis’s prose as joyless. Do you agree? Could a case be made that the prose is appropriate to the material?
2. Lewis gives the reader many concrete details in his descriptions of Gopher Prairie. Does he always mean these details to be taken in a literal sense, or are they sometimes symbolic?
3. What details does Lewis omit that would exist in a place like Gopher Prairie?
4. Does reading Main Street clarify forces, attitudes, or types of people that are still with us today? If so, what or who would they be?
5. The novel implies that Main Street is the American norm, and that other places or institutions—Greenwich Village in New York City, Hollywood, the Ivy League, and the Smoky Mountains, for example—are deviations from that norm. What do you think?
6. English writer John Galsworthy once remarked that every country has its Main Streets. What distinguishes the American Main Street?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biographies
Lewis, Sinclair. The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader. Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904-1950. Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random House, 1953.
Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.
Lundquist, James. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973.
Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill, 1961.
Sheean, Vincent. Dorothy and Red. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
Van Doren, Carl. Sinclair Lewis : A Biographical Sketch. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1933.
Criticism
Bloom, Harold, ed. Sinclair Lewis : Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Bucco, Martin. Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
Bucco, Martin, ed. Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.