Book Reviews
Three major characteristics define Lewis's work: detail, satire, and realism. Lewis remarkably portrays ordinary life, ordinary characters, and ordinary speech. Many critics...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, 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.
Sinclair Lewis Society
Main Street, which Mr. Sinclair Lewis's novel of that title has made a synonym for spiritual stagnation, is not merely the epitome of our Middle Western civilization. Nor are the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie characteristic of any one country alone, nor of any particular age. There have always been Main Streets—everywhere—and the make-up of the men and women who have lived along them has never fundamentally changed with time or place.
C. Edward Morris - New York Times (1/10/1921)
Main Street bored me to extinction. I hated it as one hates stale bread seven days a week.... [The book's] lack of style hurts at every step.... It's capacity for minuteness, plus a lumbering style, makes such a reader feel is if he were watching an elephant with a teacup—you're afraid he'll break it and you wish he would, in order to end a nerve-irritating performance.
Catherine Beach Ely - New York Times (5/8/1921)
In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them.
Lewis Mumford