Very few critics or literary scholars praise Lewis for the aesthetics of his work. It makes some sense to think of Lewis more as a social commentator than as a literary artist of the first rank. Too often Lewis wrote rapidly and carelessly; he tended toward cloying melodrama and gross overstatement. But mixed with his literary lapses are many excellent passages, and no American writer captured as well as Lewis did the nuances of the language or the personality of a particular American type.

Many critics have described Lewis as having two sides: the ironic/satiric which is where his real talent lay and the romantic for which he could never find a valid literary expression. The success of his satire is rooted in the American sense of fairness, by exposing the injustices and hypocrisy of closed social systems. His talent, and the effectiveness of his writing, depends...