Sinclair Lewis

In Main Street and Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to reveal as no writer had done before the complacency and conformity of middle-class life in America. These remarkable novels combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late." Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph,...

"In Arrowsmith, Lewis portrays the medical education and career of a physician whose idealistic commitment is tested by the greed and opportunism he encounters at all levels of his profession. Elmer Gantry dramatizes the growing tension between secularism and fundamentalism in 1920s America through the portrait of a glib and self-serving preacher relentlessly pursuing worldly pleasure and power. Dodsworth depicts the unraveling marriage of an American...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel recounts the story of a Midwestern physician who is forced to give up his profession due to the ignorance, corruption, and greed of society.