BVG on Sinclair Lewis

According to Max Weber, in his essay “Class Status, and Power”, capital, income and wealth are by themselves not sufficient indices for specifying life styles. It may assume a variety of life styles depending upon, within the same income groups, the character of consumption of choices. In dealing with “class” and its life style, one should be concerned with the distributive behavior of an individual and families in the same economic system. Harold Finestone, in his seminal essay, “Casts, Kicks and Color”, besides the Cat culture of the Negro, had pointed out the spuriousness and authenticity of life styles and class cultures. The self-consciously created artificial style of life through its presence would suggest a lack of inevitability in the living patterns that classes adapt. As the individual passes through various stages of class experience, it would not present any easy succession of life patterns which the individual can accept as “natural” or “authentic”. Each stage in the clas...

Prior to the American Civil War (1861-65), the American States were purely agrarian in their economy. There was an extensive cultivation of the lands of the Southern States that raised tobacco and rubber. The economy was that of a feudal system, and the estate owners controlled everything. To work at the core level, they had indented colored laborers brought from the African continent through the Dutch middlemen and other European slave traders. These laborers, in course of time, became the major force, as the American-Indians refused to cooperate with the estate holders of the Northern states of America. The Civil War, according t o Charles Beard (7) was “the Second American Revolution”, which had brought about several fundamental changes in the social structure, as well as in the lifestyle. Some of the agricultural operations were subjected to a phased mechanization. Also, the mischievous policy of the Northerners went concurrently with the American Civil War without any economic mo...

A rebel in literature “is one who feels discontented with personal and social life and repudiates the scale of values of his neighbours, his country and his time”. (5) Lewis was a typical rebel. He was possessed by a certain measure of sensitivity, given expression to his heart’s tumult. Equipped intellectually, he could understand with ease, the currents and eddies of the life around him. He combined belief with passion, striving to build up a public opinion by disturbing the conventional pattern of thinking in its place, a juster and a more rational body of opinion was created. He cajoled and ridiculed his fellowmen into losing their hold on traditional views. Thus the work of the rebel in literature was to continue his process. An increasing awareness of social evils was witnessed by the modern times. Sinclair Lewis in “Babbitt”, “Arrow Smith”, “Elmer Gantry” and “The Man Who Knew Coolidge”, for instance, had lashed out against hypocrisy and provincialism. Through “Main Street”, he...

As early as 1939, Lewis had called himself “a Romantic medievalist of the most incurable sort”. It might sound quite perverse, coming from a novelist of his complexion. But there was a strain that was overlooked by many. He wanted a novel to consist of “Warmth and lucidity”. He had great liking for “purple passages” found in his “Main Street” which nobody had noticed. “The man who knew Coolidge” was a novel, with a special gift for mimicry, in its most undiluted form. “He was in the habit of talking his novels out, while writing them.” (3) “Whatever Lewis wanted to be, he was not at all a romanticist, nor even a realist, but he was a satirist. His novels were rich in properties as a David Belasco stage production. And he seemed to have used properties in the Belasco manner.”(4) He was also intimately topical. So Dorothy Thompson, his wife, confided “Really, Sinclair Lewis is a phonograph record.” It was not realism but verisimilitude. It was the method of Lewis to make annoying, illusi...

Sinclair Harry Lewis (1885 - 1951) was born in Sauk Center, Minnesota. Son of a country doctor, Edwin J Lewis, he had a very rigorous childhood. It was dominated, firstly by his elder brother, Claude and later by some literary and rebellious influences. He was very proud of the medical tradition of his family. Besides his father, three of his relatives, including his own brother were practicing doctors.  At Yale, though academically bright, he was a non-conformist at the core. He edited a literary magazine and wrote long medieval poems, "(O God!) lady's (sic) clad in white Samite, mystic, won-der-ful." In another poem, he wrote about "The Little Ones and the gas-stove that was  really a beastie." He had even planned a great four-generation novel, "The Children's Children", though he could not ultimately write it. He made a trip to England in a cattle boat and in steerage to Panama. He also roamed around in the United States extensively. He had the ...

 An essay on Sinclair Lewis written by Robert Cantwell(1), appeared in critical essays edited by Mark Schorer in 1962. (pp 111-119) He described the achievement of Sinclair Lewis as ".... a recording of a historian of the America's catastrophic decline of the middle class society". This had given me the impetus to investigate and project my thesis on this subject after a study of the fiction of Sinclair Lewis. I had grown from strength to to strength under my Director of Research, Dr. N Krishna Rao, Professor, Department of English, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. His critical advice, a continuous evaluation from time to time, with a steady personal interest and encouragement had inspired me to formulate this thesis. His help is quite instrumental in shaping my research acumen. Yet another helping hand was extended by Dr. (Prof.) Isaac Sequira, Research Counselor at the American Studies Research Center, Hyderabad. A free and prolonged discussion of the topic had taken p...