Sinclair Lewis

From Philosopedia.org

Lewis, Sinclair (7 February 1885 – 10 January 1951)

Lewis was a leading Midwestern author and Nobel Prize winner in literature. He wrote Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922—originally, he had intended Pumphrey as the title), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927), the last of which was a freethinking critique of the clergy. Will Durant’s On the Meaning of Life (1932) quotes Lewis as having said, “It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.” In Elmer Gantry, Lewis used Birkhead as his technical advisor concerning ecclesiastical matters. What the novel turned out to be was a scathing satire of a Baptist-Methodist minister who changed into a voluptuous hypocrite, remarkably resembling most of the professing Christians in his congregation - a humanistic comment on the state of affairs of contemporary organized religion.

Lewis had long lambasted humanity for being what it is, rather than what it might be, as shown in Main Street and Babbitt. Kingsblood Royal (1947) is a powerful indictment of man for his cruel injustice to fellow men, another popular humanistic theme.

Main Street was inscribed to his first wife, born Grace Livingstone Hegger: “To Gracie [Lewis], who is all the good part of Carol,” a reference to the work’s heroine, Carol Kennicott.

H. L. Mencken wrote to George Jean Nathan:

Grab hold of the bar-rail, steady shock! I’ve just read the advance sheets of the book of that Lump (Nathan had described Lewis as “a tall, skinny, paprika-headed stranger”) we met at Schmidt’s and, by God, he has done the job! It’s a genuinely excellent piece of work. Get it as soon as you can and take a look. I begin to believe that perhaps there isn’t a God after all.”

His last great work was It Can't Happen Here (1935), a speculative novel about the election of a Fascist as U.S. President.

When asked specifically about humanism just before his death, he wrote to Warren Allen Smith:

Just back from Italy. I find your letter. Yes, I think naturalistic humanism - with dislike for verbalistic philosophy - is my category.

[Shown the postcard, Harrison Smith of The Saturday Review of Literature wrote Smith that he had not known that while in Kansas City during the Elmer Gantry period, Lewis had accepted Unitarian minister Rev. L. M. Birkhead’s offer to speak to some assembled Unitarians. Lewis looked out over the pews and exclaimed, “Now if God exists, I’ll give him exactly two minutes to prove it—to strike me dead!” Most of those present probably did not expect heavenly flashes of lightning to challenge his dare and, of course, he was applauded when the building remained intact. “Well, that settles that,” he told those in the audience. Harrison Smith responded, “I did not know that he had labeled himself a humanist, a mild term for an angry crusader.” But Smith promised to publicize the information. . . . Lewis may or may not have known the story that Charles Bradlaugh had done the same decades previously, giving God all of five minutes. George Bernard Shaw thought such a story fit Bradlaugh’s character and was amused, adding if God had struck Bradlaugh dead it would prove “He is a savagely violent and vindictive idol like Blake’s Nobodaddy.”]

Lewis was elected to the American Academy’s Institute in 1922, despite his scathing portrait of small-town America in Main Street and the resultant negative publicity. However, he politely declined. In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize, and during his acceptance speech he lambasted the American Academy, charging “It represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” and naming twenty-one writers he considered were more deserving than members who were then in the Academy. He also attacked the “New Humanism” of Irving Babbitt, saying, “Of course humanism means so many things that it means nothing.”

On his deathbed, Lewis reportedly said to the Catholic nurse, “God bless you,” leading to speculation that he had had “a death-bed conversion.” But columnist Dorothy Thompson, once his wife, unequivocally denied such had taken place, and she cited such evidence as the above-mentioned 3 June 1950 postcard. Lewis had been raised a Christian, she held, but became a non-believer after his sophomore year at Yale.

(See entry for H. L. Mencken, who comments about Dorothy Thompson.)

Correspondence

Warren Allen Smith, the book review editor of The Humanist, wrote to Harrison Smith, who wrote From Main Street to Stockholm, Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930 (1952):