FAQ

Main Street (1920)

With this novel, Lewis added the words “Main Street” to Americans’ vocabulary to represent the closed culture and arrogant contentedness of small towns. In Main Street, Lewis portrays Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, as a typical small town in the American Middle West, “Its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere.” His keen observations and attention to detail convinced many Americans that he was writing about their towns. However, this town does not conform to the friendly, close-knit stereotype. Readers see Gopher Prairie through the eyes of Carol Kennicott, the wife of the town doctor who has moved there from St. Paul after their marriage. She wants to bring social reform, as well as art and literature to the small community, but is rejected by the townspeople who are satisfied with their lives and disapprove of any quick changes. In this novel, Lewis criticizes Americans content with provincial lives. See Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott, by Martin Bucco (1993) and The Rise of Sinclair Lewis 1920-1930 by James Hutchisson (1997) for more information.

Babbitt (1922)

George F. Babbitt is the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a novel which was published in 1922 by Harcourt Brace. Babbitt is a real estate salesman who seems to be very much a product of his time and culture, interested in material possessions and practical education for his children. Much of the first half of the novel is primarily satire against various aspects of society: the church, men’s clubs, high school and college education, business, etc. However, in the second half of the novel, Babbitt begins to realize the sterility of his life and experiments with radical politics, engages in an affair, and attempts to find solace in male bonding in the Maine woods. All of this fails, and at the end of the novel Babbitt is back with his family, hoping that his son will have a life different from the one he has had (although it doesn’t look like it). “Babbitt” is often used to define someone who is a middle-class social conformist, although this is based primarily on the first half of the novel. Books focusing on Babbitt include Babbitt: An American Life, by Glen Love (1993) and The Rise of Sinclair Lewis 1920-1930 by James Hutchisson (1997).

Arrowsmith (1925)

Martin Arrowsmith is the protagonist of this novel, a doctor who is torn between helping others and doing serious research. He moves from being a small-town doctor to a public health inspector to a researcher at a famous New York City clinic. However, after a disturbing episode while fighting the plague in the Caribbean, and the death of his beloved wife Leora, he decides to leave behind civilization and set up a research outpost in the northern woods. Arrowsmith was made into a movie in the 1930s with Ronald Colman as Martin and Helen Hayes as Leora. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but Lewis refused it. There have been two collections of essays focusing on Arrowsmith, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Arrowsmith: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert J. Griffin (Prentice-Hall, 1968) and Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1988).

Elmer Gantry (1927)

Elmer Gantry deals with the excesses of religion in American society. In creating Elmer Gantry, Lewis researched a variety of religions, spoke in the pulpits of churches, and attended Sunday School classes. In 1926, he stood in the pulpit of Burris Jenkins in Linwood Boulevard Christian (Campbellite) Church and dared God to strike him dead within fifteen minutes in order to prove His existence. This action created quite a stir and contributed to the novel becoming a bestseller. Elmer Gantry is a good natured, lecherous, and not very bright seminary student who is able to succeed in the ministry because of his wonderful speaking voice. Although almost all of his sermons seem to be variations on “love is the morning and the evening star” (a phrase he “borrows” from the noted atheist Robert Ingersoll), he is able to be successful because he tells people what they want to hear, even though he does not believe it himself. He starts out as a Baptist minister but is forced to leave after an affair with Lulu Baines, the deacon’s daughter, is exposed. He later becomes an evangelist with Sister Sharon Falconer, an Aimee Semple McPherson type of preacher. When that affair ends in fire and calamity, he becomes a Methodist preacher with a self-conferred doctorate. The novel ends as he prays for the United States to be a “moral nation” and simultaneously admires the legs of a new choir singer. This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is a hallmark of this novel. Elmer Gantry was made into a movie in 1960 with Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer, and Shirley Jones as Lulu Baines. Both Lancaster and Jones won Academy Awards for their roles, and Richard Brooks won for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Dodsworth (1929)

In Dodsworth, the relationship between Americans and Europeans is foregrounded by the relationship between husbands and wives. Sam Dodsworth is an honest, hardworking, talented businessman with middle-class common sense. He is a fifty-year-old millionaire with strong beliefs in American values. After raising two children and helping her husband build his automobile business for twenty years, Fran Dodsworth insists that he retire so that they can go on a European tour, which Fran believes will make them more sophisticated. However, the tour results in their marriage’s destruction. Fran’s enthusiasm for the new and different is not portrayed positively; instead, Lewis applauds Sam’s American values. Ironically, Fran’s desire for status leads her to flirt with minor nobility and seek a divorce from Sam. When the nobleman’s mother rejects her as a wife for her son because she’s past child-bearing age, a dejected Fran seeks out Sam, who has learned to enjoy the slower rhythms of Europe and the charms of a glamorous divorcee, Edith Cortright. Sam and Edith also appear as characters in Lewis’s last novel World So Wide. They have become part of the community of expatriates living in Italy, belonging neither to the land in which they live nor the land in which they were born. Dodsworth was adapted into a play by Sidney Howard and later into a movie. Walter Huston played Sam Dodsworth in both versions. More recently it has been adapted into a musical.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Responding to fascist events in Europe, including Hitler’s aggressive actions and Franco’s murderous acts in Spain, Lewis warned Americans about the state of their own democracy in It Can’t Happen Here. He identifies the fascism that had been growing in the United States since World War I. In the novel, he portrays a slow and believable change in American culture and government; almost without realizing it, the United States becomes a totalitarian government. Lewis plays on American rituals, history, and commonplaces as he focuses on the electoral process and its corruptions. Doremus Jessup, a sixty-year-old newspaper editor is the focus of the novel. He stands in for those vaguely liberal, well-meaning people who believe that one doesn’t need to be too involved in the world. It is only after Berzelius Windrip becomes president, creates national concentration camps, and does away with democratic government, that Doremus becomes politically active. And by then it’s too late. Doremus’s son-in-law is killed by the government, one daughter sacrifices herself to assassinate a political leader, and the other is nearly raped by a fascist bully. Doremus is put in a concentration camp, tortured, and eventually joins the political underground, working for an American government in exile. The warning is plain. Unless citizens stay educated and involved, fascism can indeed happen here. Lewis was co-author of a play version of It Can’t Happen Here for the Federal Theater Project which had over 20 companies performing the play simultaneously. MGM planned to film the novel, but bowed to political pressure and aborted the filming. Lewis went on to play Doremus in summer stock in the late 1930s.

Kingsblood Royal (1947)

Neil Kingsblood, a wounded veteran of World War II, returns to his hometown of Grand Republic, Minnesota, to resume his life as a banker and husband to wife Vestal and daughter Biddy. While doing some genealogical research at the suggestion of father, he discovers that his great-great-great grandfather was black. This knowledge, who he tells it to, and how he needs to rethink his identity, form the drama of the novel. Although he lives in the supposedly more enlightened North, his friends ostracize him, he loses his job, and his wife contemplates the abortion of their second child. He does come to see that the received knowledge about race is not only wrong but very destructive. As the novel ends, he, his family, and some friends of both races gather at his house which is being attacked by white society.

Visit our page of scholarly works to see a more detailed listing of criticism on the works of Sinclair Lewis.

Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his novel, Arrowsmith. He was the first person who would not accept it. Lewis said at the time he did not agree with contests where one book or author was praised over another and wrote a lengthy letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee to that effect. The following is an excerpt from that letter reprinted in The Man from Main Street:

• • I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel Arrowsmith for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.
  • All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.
  • Those terms are that the prize shall be given “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment. (19)

Lewis also objected to the way publishers advertised a Pulitzer winner as the best novel of the year, as if any committee or person was competent enough to select a best novel.

Previously, the Committee had recommended Lewis for the Pulitzer for Main Street in 1921, but that May the Trustees of Colombia University overruled the jury, and the prize went to Edith Wharton instead for The Age of Innocence. Some speculate that this instance led Lewis to decline the 1926 Pulitzer. Lewis’s Babbitt was chosen for the Pulitzer in 1923, but the committee was again overruled by the Trustees and the Prize went instead to Willa Cather for One of Ours. This was a double neglect to Lewis. In a letter to his father, he wrote:

• • I see that just as Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence beat Main Street for the Pulitzer Prize, so did Cather’s One of Ours beat Babbitt. I’m quite sure I never shall get the Pulitzer.

Another school of thought is that the publicity for turning down the prize was worth more to Lewis than the monetary recompense that went with the prize (about $1000). This cynical view some say is substantiated by the fact that Lewis did accept the Nobel Prize in 1930. This award was worth considerably more. However, in a letter to a friend, Lewis made it clear that he would have accepted the Pulitzer for Main Street or Babbitt.

Lewis was very honored to be the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy awarded it to him in 1930, because of the five great novels he wrote in the 1920s, Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth. King Gustav gave the prize to Lewis in Stockholm, Sweden, and his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, went with him. Erik Karlfeldt, a poet and secretary of the Academy, introduced Lewis during the prize presentation in a lengthy survey of his five major novels. Karlfeldt applauded Lewis for, among many things, his criticism of American institutions and industry, his satire, and of course, his writing style. Karlfeldt noted Lewis’s mastery of language in the character development of Babbitt.

Lewis delivered his famous Nobel Lecture to the Academy on December 12, one day after receiving the Prize. His speech, entitled “The American Fear of Literature,” was reprinted widely and caused an enormous uproar in the United States. In it, Lewis criticized the literary standards and limited nature of acclaimed literature in America. He also generously acknowledged other authors including Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, and Ernest Hemingway.

After receiving the Prize, Lewis was asked two major questions: what was he going to do with the money and why would he accept the Nobel Prize, but not the Pulitzer. He told the media that he was going to use the money to support a young American author and his family (a private joke: he was referring to himself). Lewis gave two reasons as to why he accepted the Nobel Prize: the Nobel Prize had fewer commercial strings attached and the award was based on a career, not one novel.

Sinclair Lewis and the Nobel Prize in Literature

1920s
The 1920s, also known as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties, was a lively time in U.S. history when young, modernist ideas collided with old, traditionalist values. The end of World War I marked a turning point in American society. The horror of war, along with the use of forms of mass destruction including planes, tanks, and poison gas, created a somber mood that the average person tried to forget through jazz and booze. In this decade, the workweek was reduced from sixty to forty-eight hours and families began vacationing in the summer.

While the 1920s monetarily separated the lower and upper class, people were brought together to drink during Prohibition. As part of the Volstead Act, the 18th Amendment eliminated the licenses of brewers, distillers, and wholesale and retail sellers of alcohol. Prohibition helped inspire many of the characteristic images of the 1920s. Men and women piled into speakeasies, and breaking the law became the rule, not the exception. This was the time of Eliot Ness, Al Capone, and the Chicago mobsters. A culture emerged from these speakeasies that included flapper style and dancing to the Charleston.

During this decade, President Warren G. Harding brought the word “scandal” to the White House. There were a number of famous trials including the Scopes Trial, otherwise known as the “Monkey Trial,” where William Jennings Bryan took a trip to the stand to fight the teaching of evolution. In the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, two supposed robbers and murderers were tried, convicted, and executed. However, much evidence remains that the men were killed for their anti-capitalist political views. In the Leopold and Loeb trial, two law students were convicted of killing fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks for the thrill. The decade began with the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids and ended with the beginning of the Great Depression.

After Harding’s death, President Calvin Coolidge declared that America’s business was business, and ordinary people’s trading on the stock market increased dramatically. Easy credit led to increased consumerism. Advertisements abounded, encouraging consumers to buy luxury items, like cars and radios. In 1930, not many people owned a radio, but by the end of the decade, one could be found in almost every household. During this time, Henry Ford revolutionized industry by speeding up production. He was also one of the first employers to view his workers as customers.

The 1920s were also a decade of reform. On August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. This period included a push for other women’s rights, including contraceptives and birth control clinics. Reform movements focused on improved wages, hours and conditions, and opened the doors wider for women’s education. There were more women in the workforce than ever before. Like men, it became more common for women to smoke and drink. In fashion, women’s hemlines jumped from their ankles to their knees, and their dresses and swimsuits were much skimpier. Bobbed hair also became popular.

Famous names of the 1920s:

• Theater: John Barrymore, Irving Berlin, Isadora Duncan, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern, Eugene O’Neill, Anna Pavlova, Will Rogers, and Florenz Ziegfeld
• Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright
• Visual Arts: Ansel Adams, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Pablo Picasso
• Jazz: Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, and Bessie Smith.
• Philosphers: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jean Piaget
• Science: Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein
• Film: Charles Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, and Mack Sennett
• Popular American Authors: Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg
• Popular European Authors: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats.

1930s

At the end of the decade known as the Roaring Twenties, on October 24, 1929, or Black Thursday, the Stock Market crashed, ruining the fortunes of many companies and leaving some investors penniless. Major causes of the crash were stock market speculation and the unequal distribution of wealth in the 1920s. The decade of the 1930s was also the time of the Great Depression. The Depression did not affect only one class, though. From 1930 to 1933, unemployment quintupled, and fifteen million people were out of work. Children left school to help support their families, although not much work was available. This period saw the rise of labor unions including the Knights of Labor and the conservative and strong American Federation of Labor.

In 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected by a popular majority of seven million votes, and his New Deal presided over the rest of the decade. He implemented the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and provided work and services for the American people. Part of the CWA, the Public Works of Art Project was an experimental program in federal work relief, providing the unemployed with public service jobs during the bitter winter of 1933-34. For example, it hired artists to paint murals on public buildings. Both programs funded government projects to aid public welfare and to employ Americans.

On August 14, 1934, President Roosevelt signed the social security bill, surrounded by reporters and cameramen. It provided a social safety net for older Americans. He used the radio to reach the American people, speaking to American families through nationally broadcast fireside chats.

The Depression called for cheap, escapist entertainment, and radio programs flourished. Comedians Fred Allen, Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, and Bob Hope, as well as mystery programs like The Shadow and Suspense were popular. Board games also became popular, and Monopoly flew off the shelves in 1935.

William Randolph Hearst continued to feed the American people with print; by 1934 he published 33 newspapers that reached eleven million readers. He reported major events that occurred during the thirties, including the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the 1934 Dustbowl in America’s Midwest, the 1937 Hindenburg crash, and Adolf Hitler’s 1938 move into Austria. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

Famous Names of the 1930s:

• Music: Bing Crosby, the Dorsey brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, and a young Frank Sinatra
• Sports: the Negro League and the domination of the New York Yankees in baseball, led by Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth
• Film: Fred Astaire, James Cagney, Claudette Colbert, Ronald Colman, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy
• Popular Authors: Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, H.G. Wells, Thornton Wilder, and Virginia Woolf.
• Aviation: Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

Read more about the Great Depression.

Three major characteristics define Lewis’s work: detail, satire, and realism. Lewis remarkably portrays ordinary life, ordinary characters, and ordinary speech. Many critics, including Heywood Broun, praised Lewis for his ability to meticulously reproduce different dialects and speech. Lewis used vivid detail to create scenes of the American middle class. His social satire was critical of American life and certain types of Americans and institutions which he felt harmed Americans and prevented the country from living up to its democratic ideals.

Lewis’s novels fit under the umbrella of American social fiction, fiction whose primary purpose is to represent contemporary American society, primarily in a realist style with realistic language. Lewis artfully described American culture and life of the time, helping Americans see their own lives with their many flaws. Critics praised him, claiming that his writing represented the culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Mark Schorer, in his exhaustive biography, notes regarding Lewis’s work, “American culture seems always to have had a literary spokesman, a single writer who presented American culture and American attitudes toward its culture, to the world” (270). Lewis was that author. The titles of two of his novels, Main Street and Babbitt, were introduced into the American vocabulary. These words developed their own cultural meanings.

In the wake of World War I, amidst the culture of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, Lewis revealed to Americans their lives at a time when they were ready to listen. Lewis’s representation of the middle class and its discontent was presented through satire and social criticism. Main Street is the epitome of the “Revolt from the Village” novel and the logical conclusion to a literary trend started by such writers as Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson. Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry serve as critiques of different aspects of American society such as consumerism and conformity, the medical profession, and organized religion. It Can’t Happen Here is a warning against the growth of fascism in our own country. Even a more minor text like The Man Who Knew Coolidge uses the distinctly American voice of the businessman, one that would be picked up by humorous writers like Robert Benchley and James Thurber.

Following his five major novels, Lewis’s importance was secured when he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930. Lewis also helped other young American authors. He was Elinor Wylie’s first literary contact, and he encouraged her during the beginning of her career. Lewis assisted Frazier Hunt, writer for the Cosmopolitan, and helped him write Sycamore Bend. He encouraged Zona Gale, helped Edith Summers publish Weeds, called Harcourt on behalf of Pola Negri and asked them to publish her memoirs, and congratulated Thomas Wolfe on his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Later in his life, Lewis hired Barnaby Conrad as his personal assistant and helped him to write The Innocent Villa.

Some of his later novels were also bestsellers, includingCass Timberlane, a novel about the tension between husbands and wives in post war America, that was made into a film with Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner. Kingsblood Royal (1947), a novel about a man who discovers a black ancestor and endures attacks by his former friends and colleagues, exposed racism in middle class America to a white audience that had turned a blind eye to it.

Lewis influenced a number of authors in different ways. Authors who have written about businessmen in various guises, such as John Updike in the Rabbit series, draw on his thinking about the intersection between business and culture. Critics have also suggested that such authors as Philip Roth, J.F. Powers, T. S. Stribling, and Garrison Keillor drew on his social commentary.

Over the years, there has been much speculation over whether characters that Lewis wrote about in his novels were based on real people. It is true that Lewis’s fiction often contains similarities to Lewis’s own life. Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis’s hometown, boasts that it is the “real” Gopher Prairie.

Sally Parry’s essay, “The Changing Fictional Faces of Sinclair Lewis’s Wives,” notes many similarities between Lewis’s wives and the female characters in his novels. Lewis’s first wife, Grace Hegger, appears in idealized form as Ruth in The Trail of the Hawk and Una Golden in The Job. Grace also seems to have inspired Carol Kennicott’s character in Main Street (though Carol also has some of Lewis’s attributes).

In Dodsworth, Grace is similar to Fran Dodsworth, and the romantic triangle among Sam Dodsworth, his wife Fran, and Edith Cortright is based to a certain extent on Lewis’s own life. In the late 1920s, Lewis was separated from his first wife Grace and met journalist Dorothy Thompson in Europe. He eventually divorced his wife and married Thompson, whom he divorced in the 1940s. Some critics have seen Dodsworth as a stand-in for Lewis, although certainly Dodsworth would have been an idealized version of Lewis. Fran is probably closest to her real life counterpart. When the stage play of Dodsworth was done in the 1930s, Lewis supposedly attended rehearsals and at one point called out to the actress playing Fran, “Come on, Gracie, you can be much bitchier than that!” (Schorer 596).

In addition to Edith, Thompson also influenced the character of Ann in Ann Vickers. Ann and Thompson seem similar in general demeanor and achievement in their fields. However, Winifred Homeward, the Talking Woman in Gideon Planish (1943), negatively parodies Thompson. Lewis’s mistress, Marcella Powers, is idealistically portrayed as Bethel in Bethel Merriday (1940). Jinny Timberlane in Cass Timberlane also bears a striking resemblance to Powers.

Lewis’s own reaction to his son Wells’s birth is alluded to in The Trail of the Hawk, when Carl compares the idea of having children to a limitation on his freedom. In Arrowsmith, Martin Arrowsmith leaves his wife and son, telling his child to, “Come to me when you grow up, old man” (443).

Many films have been adapted from the works of Sinclair Lewis. Lewis even spent time in the theater helping to transform his novels into plays, most notably It Can’t Happen Here and Dodsworth.

Please visit our list of films based on the works of Sinclair Lewis for information about the films’ production, summaries, and whether or not the films are available for purchase.

Questions about copyrights for Lewis’s writings, which are held by the literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, should be sent to:

McIntosh & Otis
353 Lexington Ave.
New York, NY 10016
(212) 687-7400

mcintoshandotis.com

Eugene Winick is the contact for the Dorothy Thompson estate. Questions about copyrights for Thompson’s writings, which are held by the literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, should be sent to Mr. Winick at:

McIntosh & Otis
353 Lexington Ave.
New York, NY 10016
(212) 687-7400

Beineke Library at Yale University
The Beineke library has the largest collection of Sinclair Lewis’s papers, including manuscripts of many of his novels, including the unpublished Over the Body of Lucy Jade, many letters, and his Nobel Prize, as well as his Childe Hassam paintings. Visit the Beineke Library website.

St. Cloud State University Archive
These archives include Lewis family papers, including many pictures and correspondence by Lewis to his family. There are also two recordings of Lewis’s voice, including a radio speech and a pilot for a radio show. Visit the St. Cloud State University Archive or contact Tom Steman, University Archivist, at:

CH 50
St. Cloud State University
720 Fourth Avenue South
St. Cloud, MN 56301-4498
tdsteman@stcloudstate.edu
(320) 308-4753

Syracuse University
The archives have Dorothy Thompson holdings. The above site lists in detail what the holdings include: everything from correspondences to diaries to legal documents, as well as typescript and published versions of her various columns, and some Lewis manuscripts, including most of his unpublished plays. Visit the Syracuse University website or contact Carolyn A. Davis at:

The George Arents Research Library
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13210

Minnesota Historical Society
The Minnesota Historical Society Library has collections of Lewis’s work, as well as some personal papers. Visit the Minnesota Historical Society website or contact Pat Coleman at:

345 Kellog Blvd. West
St. Paul, MN 55108

University of Texas – Austin
The holdings here are primarily the papers of Grace Hegger Lewis, Sinclair Lewis’s first wife. It includes letters Lewis wrote to his wife and some manuscripts. Please visit the University of Texas-Austin website.

Port Washington Public Library: Sinclair Lewis Collection
The holding here include Lewis’s letters, manuscripts, photographs, theatrical items, etc. Visit the Port Washington Public Library website or contact Janet West at (516) 883-4400, ext. 110.

The value of a book is dependent upon many variables. For example, considerations include whether it is a first edition, if it is inscribed, or if it has a dust jacket. The condition of the dust jacket and the book also affect the book’s value. This is only a short list of considerations.

There are some bookstores that specialize in Sinclair Lewis materials including :

Robert Dagg Rare Books
3288 21st St., #176
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 821-2825
mail@daggrarebooks.com

Joseph the Provider Books Bought & Sold
P.O. Box 90
Santa Barbara, CA 93102
(805) 683-26003
joepro@silcom.com

Ralph Sipper Books Bought & Sold
10 West Micheltorena St.
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 962-2141
ralphsipperbooks@cox.net

Please visit our resources page to see more collectors of Sinclair Lewis.

This quote sounds like something Sinclair Lewis might have said or written, but we’ve never been able to find this exact quote. Here are passages from two novels Lewis wrote that are similar to the quote attributed to him.

From It Can’t Happen Here: “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

From Gideon Planish: “I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.”

There was also a play by Sherman Yellen called Strangers in the late 1970s which had a similar quote, but no one, including one of Lewis’s biographers, Richard Lingeman, has ever been able to locate the original citation.

Other variants include one from James Waterman Wise, Jr. in the Christian Century (Feb.5, 1936) who noted that Hearst and Coughlin were the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution” (245). Another version is from Halford E. Luccock, in Keeping Life Out of Confusion (1938): “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.'” Harrison Evans Salisbury in The Many Americas Shall Be One (1971) remarked “Sinclair Lewis aptly predicted in It Can’t Happen Here that if fascism came to America it would come wrapped in the flag and whistling ‘The Star Spangled Banner'” (29).