Sinclair Lewis: Main Street to Mean Streak

Sinclair Lewis ( 1885-1951) was an American fiction writer acclaimed for his novel Main Street as well as Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He provided a credible contribution in exploring the contradictory myths of the U.S.; from the deeply depressing to the perhaps overly encouraging. One issue is whether art can be political and at what point does the author’s work become a mere essay, political metaphor, and outlet for personal views. Or does it rest within the perspectives and structures of the Shakespearean model to be defined as art?

Sinclair Lewis

Lewis held ambivalent views of American society and was highly critical of the capitalist system’s tendency to concentrate wealth and power. Yet, he stopped short and blunted some of his attack under a self professed underlying optimism and hope. Lewis did not adopt the raw approach of contemporary Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Capricorn ,which saw Miller’s literature banned in the U.S.

Lewis’s bestseller ”Main Street” sold over two million copies. Lewis had a highly romantic vision and, his view of Main Street, middle America was both an accurate depiction and paradoxically deeply flawed at the same time. His creation of ultimately redeeming characters may have been an excuse to not plumb psychic depths at a more profound level and may have aggravated his chronic alchohol abuse. At the same time Lewis’s approach was easily adapted and intepreted in film as a form of social commentary open to multiple interpretation.

Lewis lived in an era where his personal wealth permitted a friendship with Charlie Chaplin and the funding of a film by Sergei Eisenstein. He travelled to Europe often and frequented Hemingway, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein among other Americans in Paris. However, he is more closely associated with the less bohemian Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton. It may have been Wharton’s ”The Age of Innocence” that catalyzed Lewis to explore similar terrain in his work .His writing style can be termed as fluid and free-wheeling which alleviated the weight of Lewis’s tendency to excessive wordiness. He apparently could complete a novel within a month. His use of idealistic protagonists, lonely and isolated and forced to compose and battle with more reactionary elements, makes reference to the philosophical idea of the absurd found in the work of Albert Camus. There is a detachment and benign indifference on the part of Lewis in contrast with his desire for clarity.

Much of this type of social writing was rooted or influenced by Thornstein Veblen’s ”Theory of The Leisure Class” which showed class based economics in a satirical and biting fashion; showing the most affluent and fortunate members of American society often leading a pointless and meaningless existence. These themes of conformism and unthinking commercialism are common in Lewis’s work.

Lewis once said, (Americans are)” afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.” The net of narcissism was vast and for the most part Lewis wrote within these limits.

His final best received work ,”It Can’t Happen Here”(1935) was a political essay under the guise of the novel, about a fascist coup d’etat. It was the story of creeping fascism brought on by appealing to and channeling American’s fears, prejudices and selfish interests.There were similarities to Orwell’s 1984 but Lewis could cloak evil within the banality of apple pie. He astutely foresaw how large corporations and financial interests could shape modern society and culture. Lewis was quoted as saying, ” Fascism will come wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross”.