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and finished. There is the sharp reaction of youth to so much of it, a personal note in the hatred Carol has for the people, the ways, the thoughts and the place of Gopher Prairie, a reaction and a note that savor of the agony, undimmed by intervening years, of a sensitive young creature coming from the free outlook and tolerant sympathies of a broader environment into such a prison atmosphere as that of this small Minnesota town. This impression that the book is partly by a college boy and partly by a man with many contacts with life and the world will not down; there are some poorly written pages, some jejune bits that add to it. Yet one would not wish to eliminate this youthful stand in the book. It belongs there.

—November 14, 1920

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Distinctly a “pagan book” is the dictum pronounced against Lewis’s story of small-town life in Gopher Prairie, for which he received such widespread recognition. “Main Street,” according to Bishop [Charles H.] Brent, has caused a good deal of foreboding among the older men of the country. A redeeming feature of the book, said the Bishop, is that “even in the pagan town painted by its author a tiny thread of the religion started by our forefathers still lives.” ...

The materialistic trend of modern literature, as contrasted with the idealistic character of the great literature of the ages at the apex of which he placed the Bible, was scored by the Bishop. While no book ever written contained more unpleasant facts about the ways of men and the world than the Bible, said the speaker, yet through it runs a vein of hope, a turning toward a goal. He found in the tale of Gopher Prairie and other similar writings, on the contrary, “little more than sodden depression.”

—July 14, 1921

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The texture of the prose written by Mr. Lewis gives one but faint joy and one cannot escape the conviction that for some reason Lewis has himself found but little joy, either in life among us or in his own effort to channel his reactions to our life into prose. There can be no doubt that this man, with his sharp journalistic nose for news of the outer surface of our lives, has found out a lot of things about us and the way we live in our towns and cities, but I am very sure that in the life of every man, woman and child in the country there are forces at work that seem to have escaped the notice of Mr. Lewis. Ring Lardner has seen them and in his writing there is sometimes real laughter, but one has the feeling that Lewis never laughs at all, that he is in an odd way too serious about something to laugh.

For after all, even in Gopher Prairie or in Indianapolis, Indiana, boys go swimming in the creeks on summer afternoons, shadows play at evening on factory walls, old men dig anglevirorms and go fishing together, love comes to at least a few of the men and women and, everything else failing, the baseball club comes from a neighboring town and Tom Robinson gets a home run. That’s something.... Reading Sinclair Lewis, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that here is a man writing who, wanting passionately to love the life about him, cannot bring himself to do so, and who wanting perhaps to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold.

And is it not just this sense of dreary spiritual death in the man’s work that is making it so widely read? To one who is himself afraid to live there is, I am sure, a kind of inverted joy in seeing other men as dead. In my own feeling for the man from whose pen has come all of this prose over which there are so few lights and shades, I have come at last to sense, most of all, the man fighting terrifically and ineffectually for a thing about which he really does care. There is a kind of fighter living inside Sinclair Lewis and there is, even in this dull, unlighted prose of his, a kind of dawn coming. In the dreary ocean of this prose, islands begin to appear.

—from The New Republic (October 11, 1922)

Questions

1. Sherwood Anderson described Lewis’s prose as joyless. Do you agree?