Biography Essay

The career of Sinclair Lewis is impressive in its presumption, range, and achievement. He undertook to reflect in his novels the distresses felt by a generation trying to find its way in a period of change, caught between illusion and reality, puzzled by promise and necessity. As a satirist who set himself a succession of social, geographic, and occupational problems to investigate, he faced practically every concern of readers from 1910 to 1950. He was a child of the new hope raised at the turn of the century, yet he wrote of escape into nature and the past, of the revolt from the village, and of the temptations of the city. He attempted to portray the shifting roles of women; the strains upon marriage; the ruthlessness of industrial progress; the abuses of power and money; the rival claims of West and East as well as of America and...