Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [9]
Lewis and Gracie divorced in 1928, and the same year he married Dorothy Thompson, one of the most vocal and influential journalists of the century and a superstar in her own right. Dorothy had spent much of her career in Germany, and she was one of the first Americans who understood just how dangerous Hitler and the nascent Nazi movement was likely to be. Her columns in the American press voiced her antifascist beliefs, her fears about the German regime, and her worries about Communism to an America that was trying hard to retain its comfortable isolationist position.
In 1930 Lewis became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was not a universally popular decision. The “Paris bunch,” led by Hemingway, were angry that the prize should go to a realist rather than to one of the experimentalists they championed, Ezra Pound or James Joyce. Others, like Sherwood Anderson, were afraid that Lewis won because his novels, so critical of his native country, catered to the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the European prize-givers. In Lewis’s case, as in the case of many others, the Nobel proved to be a mixed blessing; while it affirmed his genius and the validity of his style, an original blend of satire and realism, it proved an artistic inhibitor. How, he wondered, could he live up to this honor?
Dodsworth turned out to be the last of what are generally considered Lewis’s best novels. He managed, against the odds, to quit drinking, but his talent was beginning to fade. He continued writing novels right up until his death in 1951, and some of them were quite successful, notably Ann Vickers (1933), the resonantly antifascist It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), a radical, ahead- of-its -time story of race relations that won Ebony magazine’s annual prize for the book that did the most to promote interracial understanding. But his days as an influential contemporary novelist were essentially over.
Lewis and Dorothy divorced in 1942 after years of unhappiness, and Lewis spent his last years more or less alone, always looking for friendship and love but alienating nearly everyone with his tempers, his egotism, and his sporadic returns to the bottle. He died in 1951 and was buried in Sauk Centre. After years as a sort of pariah in his hometown—with Main Street he had made it, after all, an international laughingstock—he had been forgiven and embraced as the town’s favorite native son. Sauk Centre, with all the echt- American commercial instincts Lewis had mocked and deplored in his fiction, had turned its most famous dissenter into a product. At the time of Lewis’s death, Sauk Centre boasted a Main Street Garage, a Gopher Prairie Inn, and a brand of butter called The Pride of Main Street. In later years would come Sinclair Lewis Avenue and Original Main Street, the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home Museum.
One of the objections that experimental, international modernists like Hemingway had to Lewis’s work was that it sometimes leaned more toward sociology than art. This quality, however, can be understood as an experiment in its own right, and a remarkably successful one. Main Street’s journalistic command of contemporary details helped it communicate clearly to its earliest readers, and even the fact that so much of the cultural ephemera found on its pages are now mere historical artifacts does not make its effect less immediate. Lewis was working within, and developing, a particular Anglo-American tradition rather than breaking and reinventing the rules like his contemporary, James Joyce. His immediate predecessors and models were Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, George Moore, Edith Wharton, and H. G. Wells. Lewis acknowledged Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie (1900) and later the powerful An American Tragedy (1925), as a master without whom his own career would probably not have been possible: