The Novelist Who Sees Central America as It Really Is


Is Babbitt a comic book character? Is he a tragic character? Is it just a stock character from what Lewis’ friend and mentor HL Mencken calls a “booboisie”? The triumph of “Babbitt” is that we cannot answer this question with confidence. The name Babbitt entered the language – “Babbitt” was a ridiculous conformist living in a ridiculously narrow-minded world. Yet Lewis’ Babbitt is, finally, the man we care about—a character rather than a cartoon—one of a small group of American fictional creations that took place in the early years of the 20th century in very different ways. the story of the social evolution of our country: Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Wharton’s Lily Bart, Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, with Gatsby on the horizon.

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885. His father was a prominent doctor in Sauk Centre, a town of about 2,800 – read all about it in “Main Street”. The eldest of the doctor’s three sons, Fred became a miller and was never very important within the ambitious Lewis clan. The next oldest, Claude, was of notable importance: He became a distinguished surgeon, living in St. He was admired and sought after far beyond Cloud City. “I tried to impress my brother Claude for 60 years,” Lewis said at the age of 62.

Sinclair Lewis was never known by his middle name “Sinclair”. He was Harry, then Hal, finally “Red” to anyone who knew him. He was not a physically fit young man. “Before he was 16 years old, he was almost a foot and a half,” writes magical biographer Mark Schorer, “has a short torso fitted with very long, spindly legs, and weighed only 120 pounds; thin and thin, but puffy, a pimpled face (they said “pimples”), big feet and hands, poorly coordinated in his movements, everything in his body wobbles, wobbles, wobbles and stumbles, and ice-blue eyes (with astigmatism) are quite protruding, all this was reed with a carrot-colored wig.

Nor did he have the happy, normal, outdoorsy childhood he later claimed to have: skating, swimming, duck hunting; Schorer makes this clear. “He was a weird kid who was the only real friend the girls made fun of in a town full of boys.” Sports? No. Are they dances? “Since I can’t dance, I went to check it out with my mom.” But many cultures passed through the town: military bands; Ski-U-Mah Quartet; Maharasian Bards; Schubert Symphony Club; the Casgrove Company performing with musical glasses, sleigh bells, mandolins, and banjos; and traveling theater events from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the Jolly Della Pringle Company.

Most importantly – very important – there were books. His father had a modest library, and young Harry began to buy books on his own. (His favorite authors as a child were Dickens, Scott, and Kipling, and he continued to read them throughout his life.) A rotten student over the years, he started to shine by the end of high school. He was a notorious hypocrite, a copycat, and a proud author of the “class shouts”: “Cooma laca, booma laca,/Bow wow wow —/Chingalaca, chingalaca,/Chow, Chow, Chow.” He fell in love with one girl after another – sometimes two at once. She did housework, had summer chores. And he sent poems with flowers to various magazines, all of which, of course, were rejected. But he was also preparing for college, so he decided to try Yale and was accepted there after spending some time at Oberlin to hone his skills.

His career in New Haven was checkered. The only difference is “The Lit” – romantic stories, more flowery poems – published regularly in the Yale Literary Magazine. Girls? Gauche trials. Friends? A few. proximity? With difficulty. Respected educator William Lyon Phelps said of him, “He wasn’t unpopular at university, but he was seen as a freak with lovable indulgence.” His emotional state? Lonely as always. Still, he was adventurous: working one summer as a cattle rancher on a cattle ferry bound for England; One drop is the helm gateway to Panama to look for work there.

Then it wandered for several years – a well-known artist community in Carmel, a short section in the San Francisco newspaper, Upton Sinclair’s utopian colony in New Jersey. Finally, New York, where he lived in Greenwich Village and found likeable friends such as Edna Ferber and Frances Perkins, who would later become FDR’s famous secretary of labor. He earned a few dollars by selling scraps to magazines and newspapers, and selling plots for stories to well-known authors: Jack London for one, paid $70 for 14 story ideas in one transaction, and Albert Payson Terhune (“Lad: A Dog”) for another. And he had begun work on his first novel, “Our Mr. Wrenn.”



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