Surviving Modernity: Sinclair Lewis and the 1920s

Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has become something of an enigma in the American literary canon. Almost completely forgotten until recently, he appears to be having something of a literary renaissance. A gradual increase in critical and biographical output and the recognition of his influence on the work of Philip Roth and other American writers has seen his profile rise in academic circles. Lewis was a prolific writer from the beginning of the twentieth century until his death in 1951. However, it was his oeuvre of the 1920s that showed him at his literary peak. Like fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis captured and recorded the huge cultural shifts taking place in the turbulent 1920s. His novels document and satirise the commercialisation and commodification of society and culture in post-war America. Lewis recognised that post-war America represented the facets of modernity – commerce, capital and technology. His novels attempt to deal with the question of surviving in a protean modern world that was the antithesis of pre-war society. Lewis and his protagonists attempt to discover a solution to the problem of surviving the modern condition. From Main Street (1920) to Dodsworth (1929) Lewis modified and developed ideologies for the individual that ranged from nonconformity and isolation to autonomous structures. This article attempts to