| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9781931082082 | | Publisher: Library of America | | Publish Date: 8/1/2002 | | Buy.com Sku: 30984286 | | Item#: RLWY6P | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.25L x 1.5T | | Pages: 1346 |
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| | | Written at the height of his power in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the rigorous unmasking of American middle-class life begun by Lewis in "Main Street" and "Babbit."
Annotation:
In ARROWSMITH, Martin Arrowsmith fulfills a lifelong dream of becoming a physician with a passion for research. Combatting the forces of ignorance and greed, he relentlessly pursues scientific truth, even in the face of his own personal tragedy. ARROWSMITH (1925) was Sinclair Lewis's most praised novel and won him the Pulitzer Prize, which he refused. In ELMER GANTRY, Sinclair Lewis's satire of fundamentalist religion, the hero is not unlike today's corrupt and greedy TV evangelists. A charlatan and womanizer, Gantry begins as a Baptist, and rises to become the head of a Methodist church. Lewis's novel, which scandalized the churchgoing public when it was published in 1927, reveals the hypocrisy he found in organized religion. DODSWORTH tells the tale of Sam Dodsworth, a prosperous car manufacturer, who retires and travels to Europe with his shallow, affected wife, Fran. Their marriage is in trouble, and Fran tires of Sam's earnest American naivet? and takes up with an aristocrat much younger than she. When the man's snobbish mother forbids her son's marriage to such a woman, Fran begs Dodsworth to return to her. He, however, having seen her real nature and found a woman more appreciative of his good qualities, divorces Fran and lives permanently in Europe with his new wife.
| Author Bio| Sinclair Lewis | | Lewis, the son of a doctor, was born in the small Minnesota town he later reinvented in his novel MAIN STREET. He tried to enlist in the Spanish-American War when he was 13, but was brought back home by his distraught parents. He attended the local public schools, after which he went to Yale, where he never really felt accepted. He left in 1906 without a degree to work at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair's Utopian community, followed by an impulsive interlude when he traveled to Panama hoping (in vain) to help build the canal. He returned to Yale, however, and finally graduated in 1908. He then spent several years working at odd jobs and writing for newspapers as he traveled the U.S. He also began to write fiction, most of it negligible. In the 1920s he began to produce the handful of novels that would ensure his place in literary history, beginning with MAIN STREET (1920), which was enormously successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies; it was followed by BABBITT (1922), ARROWSMITH (1925), ELMER GANTRY (1927), and DODSWORTH (1929), most of them satirical critiques of American middle-class complacency. All these novels were popular best-sellers, and contributed to America's postwar de-sentimentalized view of itself. After he became a literary lion, Lewis taught at Midwestern universities. He was married and divorced twice; his second wife was the well-known newspaperwoman Dorothy Thompson. When he became ill, in his mid-60s, he moved to Italy, where he died at 65 of heart disease. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930 "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." Lewis famously described himself as "a dull fellow whose virtue--if there is any--is to be found in his books." |
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