Where to Start with Sinclair Lewis: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Sinclair Lewis — whether to begin with Main Street, Babbitt, or Elmer Gantry. A complete guide to the first American Nobel laureate.
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was the American novelist who became, in 1930, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — awarded in recognition of his satirical portrayals of American life in Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929). Lewis’s fiction is the sharpest sustained critique of American middle-class values in the first half of the twentieth century: his targets — conformism, boosterism, anti-intellectualism, religious hypocrisy, the emptiness of material success — were considered scandalous in their time and have retained their relevance. The word ‘Babbitry’ entered the language. He remains one of the most important and most underread American novelists of the century.
Where to Start: Babbitt (1922)
The essential Lewis — and one of the sharpest portraits of American middle-class life ever written. George F. Babbitt is a real estate broker in Zenith, a fictional Midwestern city. He is forty-six years old, prosperous, socially respectable, and almost entirely hollow.
Babbitt attends his civic clubs, boosts Zenith’s commercial prospects, plays golf with his business associates, and does not think. He has opinions — about labour unions (bad), about foreigners (suspicious), about the Republican Party (good) — that are the opinions of everyone in his social circle, adopted not through reasoning but through the social cost of not adopting them. He is not cruel or stupid; he is, in his way, decent. But his life is an elaborate performance of conformity, and underneath it there is nothing.
Lewis’s satirical method is accumulation — the novel builds its portrait of Babbitt through the precise cataloguing of his possessions, his language, his routines, and his self-deceptions. The critique is sociological as much as it is moral: Babbitt is what Zenith’s social structure produces, and the novel is as much an anatomy of the system as of the man. The word ‘Babbitry’ was in common use within months of publication.
Main Street (1920)
Lewis’s breakthrough novel — Carol Kennicott against the narrowness of Gopher Prairie. Sociologically ambitious and emotionally acute; the novel that made Lewis famous and made small-town America see itself.
Elmer Gantry (1927)
Lewis’s most controversial novel — the hypocritical revivalist minister. Banned on publication and still shocking in its specificity about the mechanics of religious cynicism.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
Lewis’s political novel — American fascism imagined in 1935. Periodically essential; his most urgent work.
Reading Sinclair Lewis
Begin with Babbitt — it is Lewis at his most concentrated and his satire at its most precise. Read Main Street for the sociological ambition of his breakthrough; Elmer Gantry for his most sustained provocation. It Can’t Happen Here stands apart as a political novel and can be read at any time.
For the full Sinclair Lewis bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Sinclair Lewis author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Sinclair Lewis?
Babbitt (1922) is the recommended starting point — Lewis's satirical portrait of George F. Babbitt, a middle-aged real estate broker in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, whose conformity, boosterism, and hollow respectability make him one of the most recognisable figures in American literature. The novel's critique of American business culture, social conformity, and the emptiness of the booster mentality remains sharp. 'Babbitry' entered the language as a term. Babbitt is Lewis at his most focused and his satire at its most precise.
What is Main Street about?
Main Street (1920) is Lewis's breakthrough novel — Carol Kennicott, an idealistic young woman, marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a small Midwestern town whose narrowness, gossip, and resistance to culture or beauty she finds suffocating. The novel was a sensation: rural and small-town Americans recognised themselves in Gopher Prairie and many of them were furious. The most sociologically ambitious of Lewis's novels, and the one that established his reputation, though Babbitt focuses the satire more effectively.
What is Elmer Gantry about?
Elmer Gantry (1927) is Lewis's most controversial novel — following a charismatic, hypocritical, sexually predatory evangelical minister from his cynical conversion through his rise to national prominence. Published in 1927, it was denounced from pulpits across America and banned in several cities. One of the most sustained and specific attacks on religious hypocrisy in American fiction; its portrait of the machinery of revivalism and the personality type it attracts remains provocative.
What is It Can't Happen Here about?
It Can't Happen Here (1935) is Lewis's political novel — imagining the election of a fascist president in the United States and the subsequent dismantling of American democracy. Written in response to the rise of Hitler and the domestic popularity of figures like Huey Long, it was published in 1935 and has been periodically rediscovered whenever American democracy seems under pressure. Lewis's most urgent and least comic major novel.
