James M. Hutchisson, ed.
Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism
Troy, NY: Whitston, 1997. Pp. 257. $29.50
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel

Sinclair Lewis was once considered one of America’s most important writers. As author of best-sellers such as Main Street and Babbitt and first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the man from Minnesota once occupied a central place in the American literary canon. This initially high estimation sank rather quickly and reached its low point after the publication of Mark Schorer’s massive biography Sinclair Lewis: An American Life in 1961. Arguing from the perspective of New Criticism, Schorer concluded that Lewis had been successful in spite of his character and had never been a remarkable artist. Robert L. McLaughlin summarizes the state of Lewis criticism: “The effects of Schorer’s biography have haunted Lewis studies for thirthy-five years. Reeling from Schorer’s aesthetic assault on the novels, Lewis scholars were for some time put on the defensive” (21). Even today critics seem to feel the need to justify their interest in Lewis’s writings. This is at least the impression that arises from Hutchisson’s collection of articles. Almost all of the thirteen essays include references to Schorer and attempts to assert that Lewis’s novels do merit critical attention after all.

In this first collection of critical articles on Lewis in over a decade Hutchisson brings together “a sampling of the many divergent approaches to Lewis that have been appearing: New Historicist, poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic-as well as comparative studies and studies dealing with culture criticism and canon formation” (2). Taken together, the essays suggest the correctness of Paula Marantz Cohen’s statement that “what [Lewis’s] work offers, if one approaches it with a fresh eye, is an ambivalent attitude toward experience that has particular relevance to contemporary culture” (13).

Sinclair Lewis’s oeuvre can be divided into to groups: the famous novels of the 1920s-Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth-and less well-known books such as The Job, Ann Vickers, Kingsblood Royal, or The God-Seeker. The essays collected here span the whole range of Lewis’s oeuvre. Main Street, arguably Lewis’s most important novel, is the only one of the canonized texts to receive special attention. The contributions to Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism generally approach Lewis’s writings not-as Schorer had done-with regard to their aesthetics. They focus instead on the place the texts possess in the American cultural tradition. As McLaughlin asserts, “Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here are not just words, names, or titles: they are sig­nifiers that manifest a whole range of ideas and beliefs that have come to define aspects of the American experience” (26). The various essays demonstrate the validity of that statement also with regard to the less well-known titles. Each of them argues for the novels not so much as works of art than as fictional documentaries of aspects of the American cultural experience. Consequently, one finds an essay that relates Arrowsmith to the sociocultural context of the developing business of medicine in the United States and another one that draws parallels between Dodsworth and the ideas of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

In one of the most interesting contributions, Edward Watts argues that cultural regionalism occupies a much larger role in Lewis’s oeuvre than has been acknowledged thus far: “Lewis’s work ...represents anticolonialist resistance, rejecting the Eastern dominance of the past and present” (106-7). Using Kingsblood Royal and The God-Seeker as examples, Watts sees Lewis writing against “external misrepresentations [that] cripple and distort the formation of identities and activities appropriate to place, and so started a process of correcting those misrepresentations, beginning with revising the received regional history” (107). The relevance of the Midwest for Lewis’s writings becomes obvious also in a comparison of the ideas that inform Main Street with those explored in Willa Cather’s 1921 novel One of Ours.

The collection is rounded off by an annotated bibliography of Lewis criticism after 1976, which indicates the relative stasis of Sinclair Lewis studies in recent years. Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism contains a number of interesting approaches to the writings of that much-neglected author, challenging the dominance of Schorer’s negative judgment with fresh and insightful views.