(Hardcover First Edition published by Doubleday Doran, 193...)
Hardcover First Edition published by Doubleday Doran, 1937. 426 pages, featuring 13 short stories by Sinclair Lewis published in various periodicals between 1917 and 1935. Dark green boards with gilt lettering on spine.
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(Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the...)
Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Our 7 different sizes of EasyRead are optimized by increasing the font size and spacing between the words and the letters. We partner with leading publishers around the globe. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers' new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read.
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First published in 1935, when Americans were still larg...)
First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and social critic who punctured American complacency with his broadly drawn, widely popular satirical novels. He was the most celebrated American literary figure of the 1920s, and his novels today are valued mainly for their socio-historical relevance.
Background
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the third son of Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis. His father, grandfather, and older brother were all small-town doctors. He was a lonely, awkward, introspective boy.
Education
Lewis began writing while in high school, and some of his articles appeared in Sauk Centre newspapers. He first left his provincial environment in 1902 to attend Oberlin Academy, a college preparatory school. In 1903 he entered Yale, where he began honing his skills as a writer. After taking time away from college to become part of Upton Sinclair’s communal experiment, Helicon Home Colony, Lewis graduated from Yale in 1908.
Career
After his graduation in 1908, Lewis spent several years doing newspaper and editorial work in various sections of the United States. His first four novels were all unsuccessful and insignificant, containing little indication of the satire and realism to follow. In 1920 he achieved instant worldwide recognition with the publication of Main Street, which was the most sensational event in 20th-century American publishing history. It was the story of a gifted young girl, married to a dull, considerably older village doctor, and her futile attempts to bring culture and imagination to vapid small-town life. Lewis' satire on smug provincial complacency, though devastating and admirable for its cultural criticism at the time, seems curiously naive today.
Lewis next focused on the American businessman in Babbitt (1922), perhaps his major work and the novel more likely to retain its impact. The reason for Babbitt's success was that Lewis, never a master of literary realism despite his reportorial skills, deliberately wrote in a fantastic, almost surrealistic style. Abandoning formal plot development or structure, the work achieved a quality of improvisational spontaneity. His next popular novel, Arrowsmith (1925), returned to the conventional form of Main Street to portray a young doctor's battle to maintain his integrity in a world of pettiness, dishonesty, and commercialism. Elmer Gantry (1927), an extremely emotional assault on religious hypocrisy, seemed more concerned with the main character's degeneracy than with the failings of organized religion. Dodsworth (1929), a sympathetic portrait of a wealthy retired manufacturer seeking happiness in Europe, was more successful.
The large quantity of writing Lewis produced in the following years was almost without interest. To the earlier superficiality of his fiction was now added a fatal dullness. Ann Vickers (1933) traces the career of a neurotic woman who starts as a social worker and ends as the mistress of a politician; It Can't Happen Here (1935) warns of the possibility of a fascist takeover of the United States; Gideon Planish (1943) is an expose of organized philanthropy; Cass Timberlane (1945) deals with an unhappy marriage between a middle-aged judge and his loving wife; Kingsblood Royal (1947) takes on the subject of racial prejudice; and The God-Seeker (1949) tells the story of a New England missionary's attempts to convert the Indians of Minnesota in the 1840s.
Lewis spent his last years traveling throughout Europe, unable to find publishers for his work and poignantly aware that his place in American literature was far less significant than his early admirers had led him to believe. He died on January 10, 1951, of heart seizure, in an obscure small-town clinic just outside Rome.
"He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature, but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves. "
Connections
On April 15, 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger. He had met her while they were both working in New York. The couple had a son, Wells Lewis, who died in World War II. Lewis and Grace divorced in 1925. In 1928 he married again. His second wife was Dorothy Thompson, a well known newspaper columnist. They, too, had a son named Michael. Lewis and Dorothy separated in 1937.