Sinclair Lewis

Rebel From Main Street

By Richard Lingeman

RANDOM HOUSE; 638 Pages; $35


When 45-year-old Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, he was the first American writer to be so honored. There had been speculation for some years that an American would finally capture the most prestigious of all literary awards, but few guessed that it would be the relatively youthful Lewis.

Many, including Lewis himself, believed it would go to Theodore Dreiser, who was nearing 60 and who had five years earlier published his magnum opus, "An American Tragedy." Today, neither Dreiser nor Lewis is much read, and Richard Lingeman, who made a valiant case for the importance of Dreiser in a biography some years back, now attempts, with this latest book, to restore Lewis to his rightful place in the literary canon.

In the decade leading up to his Nobel, Sinclair Lewis had published five extraordinary novels, one after the other: "Main Street" in 1920, "Babbitt" in 1922, "Arrowsmith" in 1925, "Elmer Gantry" in 1927 and "Dodsworth" in 1929. Whether he was exploring the world of small-town Midwestern life or that of the businessman, medical practitioner, preacher, or the American traveler in Europe, Lewis was able to illuminate a piece of Americana in a way that resonated at home and overseas. Countless Americans saw themselves and their neighbors reflected in the pages of his memorable novels, and readers all over the world learned to understand American life and culture in a way they never had before.

Why, then, do we not read Lewis today? Very few of his books are even in print. Lingeman addresses the question of Lewis' eclipse in the decades following his death in 1951 with intelligence and perspicacity. Noting that even his authorized biographer Mark Schorer's book was "pervaded by such a tone of disapproval that it left the impression with many readers that Schorer disdained both Lewis himself and his work," Lingeman cites Schorer's equivocal verdict: "He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature, but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves."

Lingeman ascribes this attitude to the hegemony of the "New Critics, who placed text above social context," and this is true. Today, there is no one critical orthodoxy holding sway, but looking at Lewis' prose now, one cannot but be struck by how different the style is from the American novel of today. Even in the 1920s, Hemingway began to take American literature away from the discursive style that Lewis had adapted from his literary models, the English writers Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells.

Three-quarters of a century on, such influences as the New Yorker magazine, the Iowa School of Writers and minimalism have made the heartiness and insistent authorial presence of Lewis' narrative a bit jarring to contemporary ears. But just as we adjust our expectations when we read the Victorian styles of Dickens and George Eliot, so too should we make this effort for Lewis, whose heyday (amazing though it be to contemplate) is chronologically closer to their time than to ours.

And it is well worth doing, for as Lingeman declares at the conclusion to his biography, "He was a literary sociologist who believed in seeing America first and knew his country better than most writers of his generation. His politics were a blend of old-fashioned populism and urban reformers' idealism; his literary mentors were Dickens and Wells. He measured American life by high standards and found it was not good enough. Yet who else depicted his country's faults with such coruscatingly funny, ambivalently loving satire? His fiction functioned at its highest pitch when galvanized by anger at some banality or stupidity or injustice. His iconoclasm chimed with America's coming of age after World War I, but he wrote with a real moral passion. He really cared."

As is obvious from the contrast between Lingeman's and Schorer's summing up of Lewis, this latest biographer is far more sympathetic in every sense than was his predecessor. He is a competent analyst of the novels and is wise enough to make no claims for the many less accomplished works that crowd Lewis' considerable oeuvre. Lingeman is sensitive to the demons and pressures that tormented Lewis. And the accounts of his two marriages (both of which ended in divorce), his alcoholism and the various milieus -- journalism, hack- fiction writing for magazines, the theater -- in which he operated are deftly handled.

On Lewis' politics, Lingeman is generally reliable; his chief failing is an insufficient measure of sympathy with his subject's consistent and passionate opposition to Stalinism, which Lingeman patronizingly ascribes to the influence of his second wife, fabled political reporter and columnist Dorothy Thompson. But Stalinism was anathema to everything Lewis loved: liberty, self- expression, iconoclasm, good old-fashioned American individualism. Lingeman's inability to see how central Lewis' anti-communism was to this personal ideology is a flaw in an otherwise admirable biography.

"Sinclair Lewis: Rebel From Main Street" should reintroduce a new generation of readers to a novelist whose insights are much needed now. "Arrowsmith" and "Elmer Gantry" are truly subversive novels today, highlighting, respectively, the altruism essential to good medical practice and the hypocrisy that has played such a notable part in the tradition of American evangelical preachers. Both novels are not currently on most readers' radar screens, but with tens of millions of Americans denied access to medical insurance and evangelical religiosity playing an ever greater role in American politics, they are timely indeed.