Although relatively few readers may set out to read a life of Sinclair Lewis, this well-crafted biography holds many rewards for those who find it. Succeeds in capturing the giddy, forward progression of Lewis's life, full of obsessions and accidents it's only at the end that one realizes that one has finished a tragedy.

He exasperated his two wives, explored radical politics without committing himself and was felled by alcoholism Lewis's story in these respects shares much with that of other writers. He turned down a Pulitzer Prize and accepted a Nobel. At his best, as in Main Street, he provided razor-sharp criticism of a nation greatly in need of self-caricature. His quest for a true American realism was earnest though not always successful. Possessed of limitless energy and generally pragmatic about hackwork, he poured forth reams of print all his life. A brash Midwesterner with a mile-wide goofball streak, Lewis turns out to have lived loudly, expansively and generously-far from the dour personality one might expect of a satirist.

Lingeman's absorbing biography, however, makes critics's offhand treatment of Lewis seem misplaced. But Lewis himself is remembered as an author of middling distinction who achieved celebrity with pointed satires of American mores, particularly in Main Street, BabbittĪnd Elmer Gantry. Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) lived in an era of American literary giants: there was Dreiser (whose life Lingeman has also written), James, Wharton and Hemingway, just to name a few.

Main street by sinclair lewis