{"title":"Sinclair Lewis","description":"The son of a country doctor, Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His childhood and early youth were spent in the Midwest, and later he attended Yale University, where he was editor of the literary magazine. After graduating in 1907, he worked as a reporter and in editorial positions at various newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses from the East Coast to California. He was able to give this work up after a few of his stories had appeared in magazines and his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), had been published. Main Street (1920) was his first really successful novel, and his reputation was secured by the publication of Babbitt (1922). Lewis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925) but refused to accept the honor, saying the prize was meant to go to a novel that celebrated the wholesomeness of American life, something his books did not do. He did accept, however, when in 1930 he became the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. During the last part of his life, he spent a great deal of time in Europe and continued to write both novels and plays. In 1950, after completing his last novel, World So Wide (1951), he intended to take an extended tour but became ill and was forced to settle in Rome, where he spent some months working on his poems before dying.","products":[{"product_id":"babbitt-paperback","title":"Babbitt - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis's prominence as a social commentator. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBabbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt's secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.\u003ch3\u003eFront Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis's prominence as a social commentator. \u003cbr\u003eBabbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt's secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101542813919,"sku":"9780375759253","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/hp25xFcspZ9780375759253.webp?v=1781071690"},{"product_id":"elmer-gantry-hardcover","title":"Elmer Gantry - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eElmer Gantry is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 that presents aspects of the religious activity of America in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it. The novel's protagonist, the Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, is initially attracted by booze and easy money (though he eventually renounces tobacco and alcohol) and chasing women. After various forays into evangelism, he becomes a successful Methodist minister despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eElmer Gantry was first published in the United States by Harcourt Trade Publishers in March 1927, dedicated by Lewis to the American journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe novel tells the story of a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who abandons his early ambition to become a lawyer. The legal profession does not suit the unethical Gantry. After college, he attends a Baptist seminary and is ordained as a Baptist minister. While managing to cover up certain sexual indiscretions, he is thrown out of the seminary before completing his BD because he is too drunk to turn up at a church where he is supposed to preach. After several years as a travelling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. Gantry becomes her lover, but loses both her and his position when she is killed in a fire at her new tabernacle. After this catastrophe, he briefly acts as a \"New Thought\" evangelist, and eventually becomes a Methodist minister. He marries well and eventually obtains a large congregation in Lewis's fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. During his career, Gantry contributes to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including a sincere minister, Frank Shallard, who is plagued by doubt. Especially ironic is the way he champions love, an emotion he seems incapable of, in his sermons, preaches against ambition, when he himself is so patently ambitious, and organizes crusades against (mainly sexual) immorality, when he has difficulty resisting sexual temptation himself. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn publication in 1927, Elmer Gantry created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from pulpits across the United States. One cleric suggested that Lewis should be imprisoned for five years, and there were also threats of physical violence against the author. Evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis \"Satan's cohort\".\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHowever, the book was a commercial success. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1927, according to Publishers Weekly.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMark Schorer, then of the University of California, Berkeley, notes: \"The forces of social good and enlightenment as presented in Elmer Gantry are not strong enough to offer any real resistance to the forces of social evil and banality.\" Schorer also says that, while researching the book, Lewis attended two or three church services every Sunday while in Kansas City, and that: \"He took advantage of every possible tangential experience in the religious community.\" The result is a novel that satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShortly after the publication of Elmer Gantry, H. G. Wells published a widely syndicated newspaper article called \"The New American People\", in which he largely based his observations of American culture on Lewis' novels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eElmer Gantry appears as a minor character in two later, lesser-known Lewis novels: The Man Who Knew Coolidge and Gideon Planish. George Babbitt, the namesake of one of Lewis' best-known novels, appears in Elmer Gantry very briefly during an encounter at the Zenith Athletic Club. (wikipedia.org)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101560443103,"sku":"9798888305003","price":51.21,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/Umx5QTYrTTlHNVpSK1FpY1FoVmlEUT09.webp?v=1781071726"},{"product_id":"arrowsmith-paperback","title":"Arrowsmith - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSinclair Lewis's\u003cem\u003e Arrowsmith\u003c\/em\u003e follows Martin Arrowsmith, a driven young doctor navigating the complexities of science, ethics, and ambition. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a compelling exploration of medical ideals and human flaws, offering a timeless critique of the pursuit of scientific truth in a flawed world.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101570437343,"sku":"9798330226887","price":25.9,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/id5Wwd7np39798330226887.webp?v=1781071743"},{"product_id":"it-cant-happen-here-paperback","title":"It Can't Happen Here - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump's authoritarian appeal.\"--Salon\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of \u003ci\u003eMain Street, \u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eBabbitt\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eArrowsmith\u003c\/i\u003e. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWritten during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCalled \"a message to thinking Americans\" by the\u003ci\u003e Springfield Republican\u003c\/i\u003e when it was published in 1935, \u003ci\u003eIt Can't Happen Here \u003c\/i\u003eis a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as today's news. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003eWith an Introduction by Michael Meyer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101572960479,"sku":"9780451465641","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/eUEyWW1tdFlhT0wrTC9jRkRHQ010UT09.webp?v=1781071747"},{"product_id":"main-street-paperback","title":"Main Street - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe first of Sinclair Lewis's great successes, \u003cb\u003eMain Street\u003c\/b\u003e shattered the sentimental American myth of happy small-town life with its satire of narrow-minded provincialism. Reflecting his own unhappy childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis's sixth novel attacked the conformity and dullness he saw in midwestern village life. Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors, and--worst of all--the pettiness and bigotry of small-town minds. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eLewis's portrayal of a marriage torn by disillusionment and a woman forced into compromises is at once devastating social satire and persuasive realism. His subtle characterizations and intimate details of small-town America make \u003cb\u003eMain Street\u003c\/b\u003e a complex and compelling work and established Lewis as an important figure in twentieth-century American literature.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101580792031,"sku":"9780451530981","price":7.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/NXJtZmFHVE9zYUthejl2MS8wSFVWdz09.webp?v=1781071763"},{"product_id":"babbitt-paperback-1","title":"Babbitt - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eAmusing and tragic by turn, Sinclair Lewis's classic novel is a biting satire of middle-American values whose title has entered the language as a byword for smug complacency, conformity, and materialism, and whose suburban targets are still much in evidence. A successful real estate agent, George F. Babbitt is a member of all the right clubs, and unquestioningly shares the same aspirations and ideas as his friends and fellow Boosters. Yet even Babbitt dreams of romance and escape, and when his best friend does something to throw his world upside down, he rebels, and tries to find fulfillment in romantic adventures and liberal thinking. Hilarious and poignant, \u003cem\u003eBabbitt\u003c\/em\u003e turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes Gordon Hutner explores the novel's historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. The book also\u003cbr\u003efeatures an up-to-date bibliography and explanatory notes that document and gloss the rich social history of the period. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbout the Series: \u003c\/strong\u003eFor over 100 years \u003cstrong\u003eOxford World's Classics\u003c\/strong\u003e has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101601501407,"sku":"9780199567690","price":10.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/THdrSWsrWkVZWmw3bG1WSnIwdThNQT09.webp?v=1781071803"},{"product_id":"it-cant-happen-here-paperback-1","title":"It Can't Happen Here - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eIt Can't Happen Here\u003c\/em\u003e, Sinclair Lewis crafts a chilling tale of a populist demagogue who rises to power in America, transforming the nation into a fascist dictatorship. This classic novel serves as a timeless warning about the fragility of democracy and the dangers of complacency in the face of tyranny.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101624963295,"sku":"9798330360659","price":23.02,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/1jpViJ0i189798330360659.webp?v=1781071849"},{"product_id":"it-cant-happen-here-hardcover","title":"It Can't Happen Here - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIt Can't Happen Here\u003c\/em\u003e. Are we so sure? Many would suggest that it certainly \u003cem\u003ecould\u003c\/em\u003e happen 'here, ' which is precisely the point that Sinclair Lewis was making when he wrote this book in 1935. This, incidentally, was still a few years before the worst fears would unfold in Germany, giving the book a somewhat prophetic flair. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBased on the American Democrat, Huey Long, it has been, despite that, often been associated with 'right wing' movements. This is ironic, as only a few years later it would be the Democrat FDR that would put American-Japanese citizens into concentration camps using 'emergency powers, ' much as the book's protagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was portrayed as doing, after \u003cem\u003ebeating\u003c\/em\u003e FDR in 1936. In case you miss the irony: the real-life FDR actually did what the fictional Windrip was portrayed as doing!\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe long history of abandoning civil rights using emergency powers was reprised more recently during the COVID pandemic, when Western nations and individual US states, ostensibly 'democracies, ' nonetheless invoked emergency powers to enact all sorts of authoritarian measures.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThus, when pondering whether or not 'it can happen here' (which all assume it can) we are perhaps left with a more intriguing question: Why hasn't it happened here? And then, once this has been answered, work to ensure that the factors that have prevented a full-blown authoritarian regime from materializing in the United States are retained and strengthened.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50101652521183,"sku":"9781645941644","price":33.1,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/DTejNXCjK69781645941644.webp?v=1781071905"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/sinclair-lewis.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}