“Brave New Main Street”
Richard Bellon
Michigan State University
Abstract: Gopher Prairie and Zenith have little in common with the sleek sterility of dystopian London in Brave New World, at least on superficial examination. Look deeper, however, and it becomes clear that these distinct settings allowed Sinclair Lewis and Aldous Huxley to stage the same drama: men and women of creativity and individuality and scientific temperament colliding with the deadening forces of standardized culture. The Model Ts parked on Main Street in Gopher Prairie linked it to main streets from Albany to San Diego; six centuries later, the subjects of the World State dated the beginning of their world to “Our Ford’s” assembly-line production of those cars. The biological and psychological conditioning of Huxley’s World State—the Good Citizens’ League ascendant—existed, in essence, to engineer individuals like Carol Kennicott, Miles Bjornstam, Max Gottlieb, and Martin Arrowsmith out of existence. H.G. Wells taught both Lewis and Huxley (differently) that the fate of civilization pivoted on this collision between individuality and conformity. That two of the most prominent novelists of the 1920s and ’30s gave voice to the same preoccupations is more than interesting. The shivers they felt at the looming standardization of human life reverberated through American and British culture at the dawn of mass production.
Bio: Richard Bellon is a historian of science at Michigan State University whose research specializes in Victorian British science. His teaching ranges widely over questions of science in culture, including classes anchored by Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. His publications include A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859 and “Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of Evolution, 1859–1868,” which won the Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society.
“Exploring Zenith: Narrative Technique in Babbitt“
Greg Davis
Abstract: Sinclair Lewis was an ardent researcher and careful planner of his novels. His research strategies, which have been thoroughly documented by scholars James Hutchisson and Richard Lingeman, were fairly consistent from his writing of Main Street in 1920 to his writing of Babbitt in 1922. The narrative techniques Lewis used in these two novels, however, differ. This paper will briefly discuss Lewis’s approach to developing characters and setting in Main Street in order to contrast the techniques he relied on to explore the much more complex universe of the fictional city of Zenith.
Bio: A Toledo native, Greg Davis graduated in 1996 from Haverford College and later from The Citadel, where he received an M.A.T. in 2002. For the past twenty years, Greg has taught high school and middle school English in South Carolina and Ohio. While prepping for an American literature course in 2007, Greg stumbled across Babbitt and fell in love with the writings of Sinclair Lewis from chapter 1.
“Making The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis—A Filmmaker’s Journey”
Jim Gambone
Abstract: This talk will take the audience through the incredible two-and-a-half-year journey, during a pandemic, that it took to produce The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis. I’ll be showing short scenes from the production demonstrating its main themes. I’ll end by showing the continuing work being done to expand distribution nationally and internationally. There will also be time for questions.
Bio: Jim Gambone, Ph.D., is a part-time graduate professor of public health at Capella University, teaching on-line for the past 11 years and has served as dissertation chair for 46 successful doctoral candidates. He has spoken nationally and internationally on generational and intergenerational relationships. He has been an award-winning multi-media writer, producer, director, and distributor for over 30 years. His most recent production, The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis (2021) is streaming on the Sinclair Lewis Foundation website at https://www.sinclairlewisfoundation.org/life-and-loves. You can learn more about his work at: www.pointsofviewinc.com.
“‘To Swing Constantly from Optimism to Pessimism and Back’: The Curious Relationship between H.G. Wells and Sinclair Lewis”
Ralph Goldstein
Abstract: Sinclair Lewis revered H.G. Wells, whose mark is evident on Lewis’s novels over three decades. Famous in part for his stories of time travel and extraterrestrial contact as extrapolations of present conflicts, Wells in 1938 advocated for the creation of what he called a “World Brain,” an interactive encyclopedia providing updated information from contributors involved in various fields of endeavor. Wells imagined this medium, freely available to users worldwide, as a vehicle fostering universal peace and understanding. Unlike the network we know as the internet, Wells anticipated a communication web offering benign connection with safeguards against abuse.
The title of this paper borrows a line from Sinclair Lewis’s 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where he expounds on the writer’s obligation to envision a better world. After briefly tracing Wells’s inspiration for Lewis’s early novels depicting common peoples’ aspirations, for the satirical impulse of Lewis’s 1920s novels, and for the broader societal scope of Lewis’s 1930s novels, this paper focuses on three Lewis novels of the 1940s that demonstrate a distinct stepping away from his mentor’s influence: a critique of consumer and voter exploitation in Gideon Planish as a tacit retort to Wells’s “World Brain” initiative, a condemnation of racism in Kingsblood Royal, and a repudiation of white hegemony in The God-Seeker, both of which call into question Wells’s earlier support for eugenics.
Bio: In the early 1990s Ralph Goldstein began reading Babbitt in a public park where a gated community was under construction nearby. To the sound of bulldozers Ralph came across the line that George was “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” Since then Ralph has read Lewis extensively, written for the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, and currently serves as the president of the Sinclair Lewis Society. He is a retired English teacher and presently serves the Altadena and Los Angeles Public Libraries as an adult literacy tutor.
“The Spanish Translation of Babbitt and Freedom of Expression in Culture and Art in Spain”
Isabel Marín Gómez
University of Murcia (Spain)
Abstract: Lewis’s work was known in Spain only through the intellectuals who worked as correspondents for the Spanish press in the United Kingdom and the United States, but not in Spanish, because the great impact of his work since 1920 coincided with the political stage in Spain of monarchy and military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, in which the expression of socialist and communist political ideas was prohibited and censorship was applied in culture and art. But in 1928, Rafael Giménez Siles, Graco Marsá, and Juan Andrade, after spending time in jail for their political ideas, managed to create the “Editorial Cenit” and among their publications was the Spanish translation of some of Lewis’s novels. This was very important because it recognized the existence of a literature that raised social questions. The first Lewis novel they decided to publish was Babbitt. They commissioned the translation to one of the most important Spanish philologists, José Robles Pazos, and for the cover of the book a contest was held in 1930, which was won by Manuela Ballester, an illustrator who would have great artistic success during the Second Republic. Finally, in 1930, a novel by Sinclair Lewis was published for the first time in Spanish and in Spain: Babbitt.
Bio: Isabel Marín Gómez was born in Murcia, Spain in 1960, and studied Philosophy and Letters at the University of Murcia with an emphasis on modern, contemporary, and American history and labor relations and human resources. She received a Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the University of Murcia, specializing in contemporary history with a doctoral thesis on European social history: Associationism, Sociability and Social Movements in the Francoism and Transition to Democracy. Murcia (Spain), 1939-1986, and graduated cum laude. She is a professor and researcher in the department of Social Work at the University of Murcia and has taught for over 25 years. She has numerous publications in specialist journals and books in a variety of areas including history, social history, social work history, gender, feminism, and family dynamics, using approaches drawn from literature, cinematography, music, oral history, and other forms of artistic expression.
“Sinclair Lewis’s Display of Language Failure in Babbitt“
George Killough
The College of St. Scholastica
Abstract: George F. Babbitt lives in a world in which nearly all modes of talk and writing militate against deep human meaning. To make this point, the novel provides a catalogue of kinds of discourse available. Examples include complete texts or excerpts from the following sources: the society page of the newspaper, a business letter, advertisements (for cemetery plots, home-study courses, pipe tobacco, an automobile, and a burlesque show), sermons, normal male conversation at a party and in a smoking car, a séance, a political speech, an extended booster speech, poems, pep songs, Sunday School journals, a newspaper feature story, a place card, New Thought discussion, and prayer. The failure of language in these instances is often due to the profit motive, as other studies have suggested, but there are additional causes including the tendency for words to follow well-worn paths and to become clichés, thus adding to the forces of standardization that shape and trap Babbitt. In emphasizing the limits of so many kinds of discourse in this novel, Sinclair Lewis enriches the satire and takes a major step in revealing his distrust of words, a distrust that will appear in the subsequent novels Elmer Gantry, Gideon Planish, and The God-Seeker.
Bio: George Killough is an Emeritus Professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. A former president of the Sinclair Lewis Society, he has written several articles on Lewis as well as editing Lewis’s Minnesota Diary, 1942-46.
“Outside Looking In, Inside Looking Out: Group Affiliation and Disaffiliation in Babbitt“
Robert L. McLaughlin
Illinois State University
Abstract: Babbitt, so the narrator of Sinclair Lewis’s novel tells us, is a joiner. Indeed, the first part of the novel, which depicts a single typical day in our hero’s life, shows the sheer pleasure Babbitt takes in joining formal and informal groups of like-minded, right-thinking, pep-filled Zenithians, everything from the Zenith Athletic Club to the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church. There are hints, however, that his pleasure in this celebration of conformity is incomplete. He dreams of escaping from these groups into the arms of a fairy girl. And, more tangibly, his deep friendship with Paul Riesling, who acts as something of a safety valve for Babbitt, allows him to indulge his dissatisfactions in a way that permits him to continue to value and function in his Zenith communities. When he loses access to Paul (Paul is jailed for attempting to kill his shrewish wife), he begins to act on his dissatisfactions in ways that threaten to destroy his affiliation with his groups. Although the novel has been critical of his obeisance to the values and rhetoric of money, boosting, good-fellowship, and pep, it is equally critical of his affiliation with the Bunch, the Jazz Age partiers he takes up with, and of his affair with a sexually available woman. In an oddly successful narrative coup, when at the end Babbitt gives up the Bunch and the woman and reaffiliates with his previous communities, the reader feels relieved that he’s become what we’ve come to think of as the “real” George Babbitt again. Lewis has skillfully moved us from a position outside Babbitt and his groups, from which we can judge him, to a position next to him, inside his groups, from which we sympathize with him. In so doing, Lewis implicates us in Babbitt’s world, the world we began the novel feeling superior to.
Bio: Robert L. McLaughlin is Professor Emeritus of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical and co-author, with Sally E. Parry, of We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II and Broadway Goes to War: American Theater during World War II.
“It Can Happen Here: The Transatlantic Exchanges of Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, and Lion Feuchtwanger”
Sean Nye
University of Southern California
Abstract: When Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was rediscovered during the 2016 election, many American readers were stunned by the novel’s insights. Published commentary often circled around a basic question: how could a 1935 novel by a long-neglected author be so perceptive about American politics? The complexities of the novel’s references, while appreciated, were not fully understood at that time. In explaining the novel’s impact, this paper will trace It Can’t Happen Here as a multilayered, transatlantic text informed not only by Lewis’s American critique, but also by his European travels and connections. Along with the central role of Dorothy Thompson, an additional author proved crucial here: the best-selling German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger. As seen through Feuchtwanger, It Can’t Happen Here can be read not just as a political warning, but as a complex novel informed by Lewis’s travels and by German exile literature. Such a perspective challenges the basic perception of Lewis as an author defined by the Midwest.
The years 1927 and 1928 proved central to these developments. In 1927, Lewis traveled to Berlin, where he would meet and fall in love with Thompson, while also connecting with Feuchtwanger. This trip resulted in Lewis’s extended stay in Europe. In this sense, while Weimar Berlin’s expatriate culture has long been associated with Christopher Isherwood, Lewis and Thompson arguably became the city’s most famous expats during the late-1920s. Lewis’s travels had been prepared by the enormous success of Babbitt in Germany. Feuchtwanger was himself deeply influenced by the novel, eventually deciding to publish PEP (1928), a Babbitt-styled collection of poems later translated by Thompson, and dedicated to “that good American, Sinclair Lewis, in admiration and comradeship.” Crucially for Lewis, Feuchtwanger would go on in 1930 to publish a major novel, Success, which marked the first satirical depiction of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in German literature. The satirical dimension of that novel was itself informed by Lewis’s American critiques of the 1920s, and as could be expected, this resulted in Feuchtwanger’s immediate need for exile to France in 1933.
Such connections help to explain not only the biting and urgent political critique of It Can’t Happen Here, but also the transatlantic scope of its vision. While an American warning, Lewis’s novel reveals a transatlantic frame informed by Thompson and the German exiles. Lewis was here also aware that his reception of the Nobel Prize had followed immediately after Thomas Mann, who would become the most prominent literary exile. In this spirit, It Can’t Happen Here references both Feuchtwanger and Mann, and it features a story involving the protagonist’s own exile in Canada. These examples help explain the subtleties of political advocacy and exile that are explored across the novel. It is also these connections that need renewed understanding, especially in a time when transatlantic connections are under ever increasing strain.
Bio: Sean Nye is Associate Professor of Practice in Musicology at the University of Southern California. His research crosses over between 20th-century popular music, literature and exile studies, science fiction, and media studies. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. in the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
“The Man Nobody Knows: George Babbitt and Religion”
Sally E. Parry
Illinois State University
Abstract: For George Babbitt, religion and business are intertwined. Representations of capitalism, such as the tall towers of Zenith, elicit in him a sort of religious awe, and membership in an appropriate upper-class Protestant church demonstrates to his fellow businessmen that he believes in the right things. This mingling of business and religion wasn’t unique to Babbitt. In 1925, Bruce Barton published The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, arguing that Jesus was a terrific example of a modern executive. Although published after Babbitt, Barton’s work exemplifies why Babbitt would feel comfortable helping to market the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church’s Sunday School, but devastated when the church cannot help him during his midlife crisis.
Bio: Sally E. Parry has served as the Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society and editor of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter for over 30 years. She recently retired from Illinois State University and is Professor Emerita of English. She is the editor of two short story collections, Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America and The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis, and has written the introductions to the Signet editions of Babbitt and Arrowsmith. She is the co-author, with Robert L. McLaughlin, of We’ll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema during World War II and Broadway Goes to War: American Theater during World War II.
“‘Our Standardized American Citizen’: Boosterism as Provincial Pride (and Prejudice) in Babbitt“
Shaun F. Richards
Abstract: In chapter 14 of 1922’s Babbitt, the novel’s eponymous protagonist gives a series of speeches that sing a paean to the “power and purity” of American civilization during the prosperous early interwar period. George F. Babbitt boosts the “Zip,” “Bang,” and “Vision” of every “sane” breadwinning businessman in Zenith and the American Midwest while simultaneously “knocking” other, larger U.S. cities for being overrun with hordes of “unnumbered foreigners” that have emigrated from the “worn-out” and “decayed nations of Europe.” Babbitt’s rhetorical flourish reaches a booming crescendo by threatening physical violence to any “crank”—native-born or not—who refuses to boost “Uncle Samuel, U.S.A.!” This talk will reveal a subtext of local, regional, and national pride and prejudice not only in Babbitt’s speeches during his brief side gig as a public speaker but also the implicit biases and hubris attached to whatever he says in the entire novel. While displaying pride in one’s locality is not itself inherently problematic, giving voice to prejudice against members of racial and ethnic minority groups and the working-classes, especially immigrants and non-Christians, is a historical issue that continues to resonate today. Likewise, public statements like those made by Babbitt vilify other Americans as either members of the Socialist Party or the “long-haired intellectual gentry.” Whether foreign or domestic, these outgroups are viewed as enemies of the state that threaten American ideals about white masculinity, civic identity, unfettered capitalism, conservative politics and morality, and performance culture.
Bio: Shaun F. Richards recently received his doctorate in American Studies at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include U.S. literary, cultural, and intellectual history through critical lenses of race, gender, and sexuality. He became a standing member of the Sinclair Lewis Society in 2020 while writing his dissertation, one chapter of which examined the changing professional landscape of scientific medicine in Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Arrowsmith.
