Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street

I actually stumbled into this book because of my interest in the art of Grant Wood. I purchased an old special edition of Main Street that was illustrated by Wood. After enjoying the illustrations, I decided that I might as well read the book. Well, that led to Babbitt and Elmer Gantry (with two more on order.) As I looked for Sinclair Lewis books, I saw this biography by Lingeman and was impressed by the great reviews (and the low price of used copies.) I decided to give it a try. In biographies, I mainly read about Victorian scientists but I have enjoyed a few political and artist's bio's. I did not know what I was in for with this incredibly interesting 554 page story of one of the most interesting people I can imagine. Lingeman is a master who combines an incredible amount of research with a writing style that will make you feel as if you are reading a page-turner of a novel. If you have read this far without buying the book of course you are interested in Sinclair Lewis so go ahead, buy the book, and enjoy it.

Schorer's 1961 biography of Lewis, while well researched, came off as particularly mean-spirited. I could never understand why a biographer would take on the huge task of an exhaustive biography when they seem to distain it's subject so much. Finally Mr. Lingeman has given us a more even handed look at one of America's most neglected authors. Perhaps it was the great popularity of Lewis during the 1920's that brought about a more recent reaction against him but it seems that the time is ripe for another look at this most American of American authors and the Lingeman book makes that clear. This biography is clearly as in depth as Schorer's but, fortunately, does not have some strange axe to grind. Besides, the life of Sinclair Lewis makes for some interesting reading when it is put forth honestly.

Okay, I haven't read Mark Schorer's earlier biography, but I have read a number of other critical works about Lewis over the years, and more than half of Lewis' twenty-odd novels.I found this book fascinating and insightful, and I was moved by Lingeman's final argument - that the time is ripe for a rediscovery of Lewis, that the "license to consider Lewis an irrelevant hack" that Schorer's book had conferred on the academic world is expired. I think it's criminal that Lewis is hardly even read in colleges today, while Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cather, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc., are still read and discussed in detail. (Nothing against these great writers, all of whom I've read extensively, but Lewis was there first and made all their paths to brilliance easier.)As long as America is still loaded with familiar George Babbitts, Elmer Gantrys, Sam Dodsworths, Carol Kennicotts, etc., Lewis will be a classic (if not THE classic) American novelist. And Lingeman's biography presents a revealing picture of the unique, angry, ultimately lonely man behind these characters.

As one of a diminishing number of whole-hearted Lewis enthusiasts in America, having read all of Lewis's novels except *Hike and the Aeroplane,* I have to say that Mark Schorer's biography of 1961 remains the standard. Lingeman does fill in details Schorer wouldn't or couldn't and adds some tangential specifics for which devotees such as I can be grateful. A meeting between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lewis in 1922 is sketched in (but how does Lingeman know what they talked about after they closeted themselves with a bottle of gin?); we know more about (say) the circumstances surrounding Lewis's researches for *Gideon Planish,* and Lingeman gets down to the brief nitty-gritty of Lewis's sexual performance, but he has no fresh overall understanding, nor are his specifics brought into new focus, or any special focus. Instead, he builds upon Schorer's essential claim: Lewis's limitations and strengths as a writer are his commitment to surface; his refusal to look into himself comes from the painful and constricting boyhood that stunted the writer even as it enabled him.I'd nominate Schorer's biography as a great one, qualifying my appraisal only by a parodying Hemingway on Gilbert Seldes: "It could only have been better if Sinclair Lewis had been better." The figure in the carpet, the consistent understanding that ties a book together, is vividly present on every page of Schorer. And unlike Lingeman, Schorer could talk with Lewis's two wives, plus Claude and Michael Lewis, Harry Maule, and Bennett Cerf; his account of Lewis's horrifying, seedy end in Italy is enlivened by portraits of the dermatologist Vincenzo Lapiccirella, the old servant whose refusal to discuss Lewis's alcoholism Schorer finds "engagingly reticent" (Schorer bristles with savage and delicious irony), and the enigmatic Alexander Manson. Beside Schorer, Lingeman is thin and pale, but if Lewis's fixing of quintessential American types and his sense of humor and sense of outrage appeal, you'll want to read his biography anyway, as I did.

I had high hopes for this book before I started, and then had the rare pleasure of having those hopes surpassed. In this immensely readable biography, Lingeman brings us the Sinclair Lewis we have always wanted to admire, but perhaps never dared: the flawed, brash, idealistic cynic that put on the page a world as American as he was. Over and over I was struck by how relevent the world of Lewis was, and how like our own it continues to be.Neither heavily academic, nor breezy and light, this biography does exactly what it is supposed to do -- shines light upon a writer we remember, but never really knew.