Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
Pilgrim's Progress
By Elizabeth Hardwick
Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street
by Richard Lingeman
Random House, 659 pp., $35.00
Sinclair Lewis: An American Life
by Mark Schorer
McGraw-Hill, 867 pp. (1961; out of print)
Sinclair Lewis: Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth
edited by Richard Lingeman
Library of America, 1,346 pp., $40.00(to be published in September 2002)
Sinclair Lewis, with a crumpled face, red hair, manic zest, and manic writing, came forth from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the year of his birth, 1885. His father was a doctor and after the death of his mother he had a kind, ambitious, ever-onward stepmother. The young man was not a hick, although he could pose as one when it suited him; nevertheless his gift for the language and the posturings of a country boy lead one to speculate that the tangled roots of provincialism still sprouted within him. On the other hand, he was as mobile as a hardy cormorant who by gluttonous study and preparation made his way to Yale and then off in the blue. After college, he will alight in Greenwich Village; Carmel, California; Washington; and Long Island; later, with his marriage to the famous columnist Dorothy Thompson, he more or less hitched a ride with her to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow.
Review, 7082 words
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