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unspeakably pretentious and an embarrassing social climber, and wondered why Lewis was so deeply in thrall to her; H. L. Mencken, for instance, wrote that Lewis’s “inferiority complex made it simply impossible for him to stand up to her. He lived in wonder that so ravishing and brilliant a female had ever condescended to marry him” (quoted in Lingeman, p. 209). It is true that the two proved, in the end, incompatible; Lewis’s inability to settle down in one place and, eventually, to stop drinking made life almost impossible for her, and Gracie’s snobberies and prejudices soured Lewis. But their relationship was a close one for years, and Gracie contributed a great deal to Lewis’s life and work, not least as the model for Carol Kennicott. Most important, perhaps, she shared his very real hatred for narrow-mindedness and intolerance, a hatred that was one of the driving forces of his life, and she supported him intellectually and emotionally to the best of her abilities.

Lewis was making progress in his fiction. His short stories were selling well, and when he was taken on as a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post he felt justified in quitting his job in publishing to become a full-time writer. His next two novels, The Trail of the Hawk (1915) and The Job (1917), were enthusiastically received, with critics laying bets that here, in embryo, was a major writer.

He was beginning to move in a more satirical direction, taking aim at some of the baneful aspects of contemporary life that would preoccupy him throughout his career: the cutthroat worlds of business and advertising, the business of evangelism, the American obsession with pseudo-religions like New Thought and theosophy. Lewis’s disgust for the low tactics of business and the American tendency to apotheosize its ethics would come to full maturity in Babbitt, but was already bearing fruit in a series of short stories about a “bunk” advertising man, Lancelot Todd, and his series of imaginative scams on the public. Fastidious litterateurs criticized what they considered the stories’ vulgar style, but Lewis, to his credit, remained unconvinced that vulgarity was such a very undesirable quality. He was, as it turned out, creating a new way of dealing with language in literature, formulating a strong, stylized version of the American vernacular that would resonate in his readers’ ears. Lewis’s characters, like many characters in fiction, are what they speak. The high ideals of the young research physician Martin Arrowsmith struggle to break free from his limited, provincial vocabulary; the ethereal, Keatsian beauty of Main Street’s Erik Valborg is negated when he comes out with his characteristic “Yumps” and “You bets.”

When America entered World War I in 1917, Lewis found his voice momentarily stilled. He was disgusted with the general outpouring of anti-German venom and disturbed by the effective limits that were put on free speech, or indeed anything that could be construed as the least bit anti-American. In 1918 one of Lewis’s heroes, the labor leader Eugene Debs, was imprisoned merely for expressing his opinion that the United States ought to have stayed out of the war. Lewis waited; three years later, in Main Street, he would reveal his own feelings about the surge of wartime jingoism.

The postwar mood was more cynical, more willing to question American motivations and values—more in tune with Lewis’s own personality and beliefs. Main Street was published at what was probably the perfect moment, with more and more people, not just artists and intellectuals but ordinary Americans, coming to share his doubts. Its success was not only attributable to his particular genius, but was a sign that America was ready to swallow his bitter medicine.

As an international celebrity in the 1920s, Lewis continued the peripatetic habits of his youth, dragging Gracie and their young son, Wells, around Europe—which Gracie enjoyed—and through various points west of New York, which she often did not. In France they were snubbed by their fellow expatriates the Hemingway-Stein