Sinclair Lewis Books In Order

Novels

  1. Hike and the Aeroplane (1912)
  2. Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
  3. The Innocents (1917)
  4. The Job (1917)
  5. Free Air (1919)
  6. Main Street (1920)
  7. Babbitt (1922)
  8. Arrowsmith (1925)
  9. Mantrap (1925)
  10. Elmer Gantry (1927)
  11. Dodsworth (1929)
  12. Ann Vickers (1933)
  13. Work of Art (1934)
  14. It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
  15. The Prodigal Parents (1938)
  16. Bethel Merriday (1940)
  17. Gideon Planish (1943)
  18. Cass Timberlane (1945)
  19. Kingsblood Royal (1947)
  20. World So Wide (1951)
  21. Storm in the West (1963)

Omnibus

  1. Main Street and Babbitt (1992)

Collections

  1. Selected Short Stories (1935)
  2. If I Were Boss (1997)

Plays

  1. Jayhawker (1935)

Non fiction

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Sinclair Lewis Books Overview

Our Mr. Wrenn

Upton Sinclair 1878 1968 wrote over 90 books in several genres. He was considered to be a leading social advocate. Because of his novel The Jungle, which dealt with conditions in the meat packing industry, The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth. Our Mr. Wrenn, published in 1914, was the second novel written by Lewis. Mr. Wrenn is a pacifist and a good man who dreams of traveling overseas. Wrenn watches movies to escape his boring job. A small inheritance helps him quit his job and travel for a few weeks. His trip helps him leave his shell even landing him in a fistfight with a bully. When he returns to New York he makes friends and meets Nelly.

The Innocents

Sinclair Lewis 1885 1951 was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.’ His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as their strong characterizations of modern working women. The Innocents: A Story for Lovers is an expanded version of a serial story that originally appeared in Woman’s Home Companion.

The Job

1926. Lewis, was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Possibly the greatest satirist of his age, Lewis wrote novels that present a devastating picture of middle class American life in the 1920s. Although he ridiculed the values, the lifestyles, and even the speech of his characters, there is often affection behind the irony. Lewis began his career as a journalist, editor, and hack writer. He became an important literary figure with the publication of Main Street. His seventh novel, Babbitt, is considered by many critics to be his greatest work. One of his major works The Job begins: Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small town middle class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been captain of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Free Air

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ”CHMoNo, CALif CHAPTER III A YOUNG MAN IN A RAINCOAT ‘TTTUH! Such an auto! Look, it break my har L J. ness a’ready! Two dollar that cost you to mend it. De auto iss too heavy! ‘ stormed Zolzac. ‘ All right! All right! Only for heaven’s sake go get another harness! ‘ Claire shrieked. ‘ Fife fifty dot will be, in all.’ Zolzac grinned. Claire was standing in front of him. She was thinking of other drivers, poor people, in old cars, who had been at the mercy of this golden hearted one. She stared past him, in the direction from which she had come. Another motor was in sight. It was a tin beetle of a car; that agile, cheerful, rut jumping model known as a ‘bug’; with a home tacked, home painted tin cowl and tail covering the stripped chassis of a little cheap Teal car. The lone driver wore an old black raincoat with an atrocious corduroy collar, and a new plaid cap in the Harry Lauder tartan. The bug skipped through mud where the Boltwoods’ Gomez had slogged and rolled. Its pilot drove up behind her car, and leaped out. He trotted forward to Claire and Zolzac. His eyes were twenty seven or eight, but his pink cheeks were twenty, n and when he smiled shyly, radiantly he was no age at all, but eternal boy. Claire had a blurred impression that she had seen him before, some place along the road. ‘ Stuck ?’ he inquired, not very intelligently. ‘ How much is Adolph charging you ? ‘ ‘ He wants three fifty, and his harness broke, and he wants two dollars ‘ ‘Oh! So he’s still working that old gag! I’ve heard all about Adolph. He keeps that harness for pulling out cars, and it always busts. The last time, though, he only charged six bits to get it mended. Now let me reason with him.’ The young man turned with vicious quickness, and for the first time Cla…

Main Street

Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today’s top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader’s viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works. This is America a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. So Sinclair Lewis recipient of the Nobel Prize and rejecter of the Pulitzer prefaces his novel Main Street. Lewis is brutal in his depictions of the self satisfied inhabitants of small town America, a place which proves to be merely an assemblage of pretty surfaces, strung together and ultimately empty. Brooke Allen holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She is a book critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, and The New Leader. A collection of her essays, Twentieth Century Attitudes, will be published in 2003.

Babbitt

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader’s understanding of these enduring works. In the small midwestern city of Zenith, George Babbitt seems to have it all: a successful real estate business, a devoted wife, three children, and a house with all the modern conveniences. Yet, dissatisfied and lonely, he’s begun to question the conformity, consumerism, and competitiveness of his conservative, and ultimately cultureless middle class community. His despairing sense that something, many things are missing from his life leads him into a flirtation with liberal politics and a fling with an attractive and seemingly bohemian widow. But he soon finds that his attempts at rebellion may cost more than he is willing to pay. The title of Sinclair Lewis s 1922 satire on American materialism added a new word to our vocabulary. Babbittry has come to stand for all that s wrong with a world where the pursuit of happiness means the procurement of things a world that substitutes stuff for soul. Some twenty years after Babbitt s initial success, critics called Lewis dated and his fiction old fashioned. But these judgments have come to seem like wishful thinking. With Babbitry evident all around us, the novel is more relevant than ever. Kenneth Krauss teaches drama at the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, New York. His books include Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage, Private Readings/Public Texts, and The Drama of Fallen France.

Arrowsmith

Written at the height of his powers in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the vigorous unmasking of American middle class life begun by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Babbitt. In Arrowsmith 1925 Lewis portrays the medical career of Martin Arrowsmith, a physician who finds his commitment to the ideals of his profession tested by the cynicism and opportunism he encounters in private practice, public health work, and scientific research. The novel reaches its climax as its hero faces his greatest challenges amid a deadly outbreak of plague on a Caribbean island. Elmer Gantry 1927 aroused intense controversy with its brutal depiction of a hypocritical preacher in relentless pursuit of worldly pleasure and power. Through his satiric expos of American religion, Lewis captured the growing cultural and political tension in the 1920s between the forces of secularism and fundamentalism. Dodsworth 1929 follows Sam Dodsworth, a wealthy, retired Midwestern automobile manufacturer, as he travels through Europe with his increasingly restless wife, Fran. The novel intimately explores the unraveling of their marriage, while pitting the proud heritage of European culture against the rude vigor of American commercialism.

Elmer Gantry

Read by Anthony Heald, this audiobook is the 2009 winner of the prestigious Audie Award for Best Literary Fiction. When Elmer Gantry was published in 1927, it created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities, and there were threats of physical violence against the author. Elmer Gantry is the portrait of a silver tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church, yet lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self indulgence. The title character starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel, Gantry encounters fellow religious hypocrites. Although often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited. Elmer Gantry is considered a landmark in American literature and one of the most penetrating studies of hypocrisy in modern literature. The novel also represents the evangelistic activity of America in the 1920s and people’s attitudes toward it.

Dodsworth

Meet Sam Dodsworth, an amiable fifty year old millionaire and ‘American Captain of Industry, believing in the Republican Party, high tariffs and, so long as they did not annoy him personally, in Prohibition and the Episcopal Church.’ Dodsworth runs an auto manufacturing firm, but his beautiful wife, Fran, obsessed with the notion that she is growing old, persuades him to sell his interest in the company and take her to Europe. He agrees for the sake of their marriage, but before long, the pretensions of the cosmopolitan scene prove more enticing to Fran than her husband. Both a devastating, surprisingly contemporary portrait of a marriage falling apart and a grand tour of the Europe of a bygone era, Dodsworth is stamped with Sinclair Lewis’s signature satire, wickedly observant of America’s foibles and great fun.

Ann Vickers

Some reviewers were outraged by Ann Vickers when it first appeared in 1933. ‘Persons unused to horrid and filthy things had better stay at a safe distance from this book,’ wrote one. Lewis’s Ann Vickers is a complex character: a strong minded prison superintendent dedicated to enlightened social reform, she also seeks to fulfill herself as a sexual being. Ann Vickers is in all respects her own person, standing up to the confining rules of her society.

It Can’t Happen Here

The only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can’t Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press. Now finally back in print, It Can’t Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that’s as fresh and contemporary as today’s news.

Gideon Planish

Isaac Goldberg translated this 1921 collection of Brazilian Tales. Stories included are The Attendant’s Confession by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, The Fortune Teller by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, Life by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis, and The Vengeance of Felix by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis. Also included are The Pigeons by Coelho Netto and Aunt Zeze s Tears by Carmen Dolores.

Kingsblood Royal

A neglected tour de force by the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Kingsblood Royal is a stirring and wickedly funny portrait of a man who resigns from the white race. When Neil Kingsblood a typical middle American banker with a comfortable life makes the shocking discovery that he has African American blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white.

As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today’s newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis’s astonishing achievement.

Main Street and Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis drew on his boyhood memories of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to explore middle class life in America as no writer had done before. These remarkable novels combine biting satire with an lingering affection for the men and women who, as he wrote of Babbitt, want to ‘seize something more than motor cars and a house before it’s too late.’ ‘Main Street’ was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history; it is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow mindedness of her Midwestern community where the romance of the frontier has dwindled to drab reality. ‘He is America incarnate, exuberant and exqusite,’ H.L. Mencken said of George Babbitt. With this boisterous, vulgar, gadget loving real estate man, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature, the total conformist and captured the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture.

Selected Short Stories

Thirteen stories selected by Lewis himself which illustrate the wide range of his art and interests. Without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. Mark Schorer

If I Were Boss

Anthony Di Renzo makes available for the first time since their original publication some eighty years ago a collection of fifteen of Sinclair Lewis’s early business stories. Among Lewis s funniest satires, these stories introduce the characters, themes, and techniques that would evolve into Babbitt. Each selection reflects the commercial culture of Lewis s day, particularly Reason Why advertising, self help manuals, and the business fiction of the Saturday Evening Post. The stories were published between October 1915 and May 1921 nine in the Saturday Evening Post, four in Metropolitan Magazine, one in Harper s Magazine, and one in American Magazine. Because some things have not changed in the American workplace since Lewis s day, these highly entertaining and unflinchingly accurate office satires will appeal to the fans of Dilbert and The Drew Carey Show. In a sense, they provide lay readers with an archaeology of white collar angst and regimentation. The horror and absurdities of contemporary corporate downsizing already existed in the office of the Progressive Era. For an audience contemplating the death of the American middle class, Lewis s stories provide an important retrospective on earlier times and a preliminary autopsy on the American dream. Appearing just in time to celebrate the seventy fifth anniversary of the publication of Babbitt, this collection rescues Lewis s best early short fiction from obscurity, provides extensive information about his formative years in advertising and public relations, and analyzes both his genius for marketing and his carefully cultivated persona as the Great Salesman of American letters.

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