Sinclair Lewis is much more than 'Main Street' -- Minnesotan was a literary superstar

Jun. 5—Patrick Coleman is on a mission to persuade you to read Sinclair Lewis. Born in Sauk Centre, Minn., Lewis wrote 23 novels and seven plays and was the first American to win the prestigious Nobel Prize for his writing. He blazed across the literary firmament in the 1920s, rich and famous, until he was eclipsed by writers half a generation younger, including Ernest Hemingway and fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Read Sinclair Lewis' books. He has something to say for 21st Century Americans," says Coleman, Minnesota Historical Society acquisitions librarian and curator of the current MNHS exhibit "Sinclair Lewis: 100 Years of Main Street." The exhibit celebrates Lewis' best-known novel, "Main Street," and is a jumping-off place for the public to learn more about this complicated author.

Coleman is so committed to bringing Lewis' writing to a new generation he spent two years putting the exhibition together, and the more he learned, the more his admiration grew for the author and his writing, which combines social realism and satire.

Lewis, a gangly man nicknamed Red, an alcoholic with intelligent blue eyes and an acne-pitted face, wrote his Big Five novels in one decade-long burst of creativity: "Main Street" (1920), "Babbitt" (1922), "Arrowsmith" (1925), "Elmer Gantry" (1927), and "Dodsworth" (1929). He had later success with "Kingsblood Royal" (1947) and "Cass Timberlane" (1945).

"Lewis' books tackled intractable issues of his day that are still with us," Coleman says. "He railed against racism in 'Kingsblood Royal,' about a man who discovers he has a Black ancestor that most readers recognize as a tract for our times."

Lewis was ahead of his time in taking on tough subjects. His feminist trilogy — "Main Street," "The Job" (1917) and "Ann Vickers " (1933) include divorce, adultery, and abortion.

In "Main Street," Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie (Sauk Centre) after marrying the local doctor. She tries to bring culture to the small town but is met by gossip, greed, conventionality, and the bigotry of small-town minds.

Although citizens of Sauk Centre at first disliked the book, which was banned at the nearby Alexandria public library, they later embraced Lewis' connection to their town.

"Main Street" sold 100,0000 copies just a few months after publication. Lewis' biographer Mark Schorer wrote it was "the most sensational event in 20th-century history, from the point of view of both sales and of public response."

Coleman points to a display of magazine covers in the exhibit that capture Lewis' popularity. He is perhaps the only writer to appear twice on the covers of Time magazine, pictured in March of 1927 for a story about "Elmer Gantry," the con artist-turned-preacher who predates the 20th century evangelical TV pastors. The 1945 cover illustration shows Lewis' head ringed with dollars, alluding to his status as a bestselling author.

The most prestigious item in the exhibit, and one of the smallest, is Lewis' gold Nobel Prize medal, given "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." He was so worried about keeping the valuable medal he gave it for safekeeping to his alma mater, Yale University.

Lewis won technical Pulitzer Prizes for "Main Street" and "Babbitt," but the prize jury was overruled by the trustees of Columbia University because the award was supposed to represent the "wholesome atmosphere of American life," and that didn't fit the tone of Lewis' books. When Lewis finally won the coveted prize for "Arrowsmith" in 1926, he rejected it because of the previous snubs and because he disagreed with the criteria. ("Arrowsmith" is about a doctor from a small town whose medical ethics are put to the test. "Babbitt" features a town booster who represents Lewis' take on the Chamber of Commerce mentality.)

Despite Lewis' enormous success as a writer in the early 20th century, his books fell out of favor as the Jazz Age ended. Ernest Hemingway famously declared, "Sinclair Lewis is nothing."

Lewis' biographer Richard Lingeman, author of "Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street," explained in a Pioneer Press interview why Lewis seemed adrift in the Depression: "In the 1920s, Lewis had a sort of clear target when he could attack the Babbitts and Elmer Gantrys. In the 1930s, people were not so ironic and humorous. You didn't attack sacred institutions when the middle class was frightened and besieged."

Coleman thinks readers perceptions changed, too. "A lot of readers today don't get the humor in Lewis' writing," he says. "This is so Minnesota Nice to read seriously instead of laughing at his satire."

WHO IS THIS GUY?

When you enter the Main Street Exhibit at the History Center, you first see a picture of infant Sinclair in a little white dress. Also displayed are his diploma and yearbook from Sauk Centre High School.

Coleman challenges the myth that Lewis had an unhappy childhood. He takes a more nuanced approach to Lewis' years in the town of 2,800 citizens located between Alexandria and St. Cloud.

"Growing up in Sauk Centre gave Lewis preparation for his life. His stepmother (Isabel Warner Lewis) couldn't have been better. Lewis wrote that she read to him 'more than was the village custom,' which says a lot," Coleman explains.

Lewis knew the town thought he was odd. He was a poor student and was not very good at athletics, unlike his older brother Claude.

As an adult, Lewis reminisced in the third person: "His boyhood was utterly common place ... except for a love of reading not very usual in that raw new town. He reveled in Dickens, Walter Scott, Washington Irving. Doubtless this habit of reading led to his writing."

In 1903, when Lewis was at Oberlin College preparing for Yale entrance exams (in Greek!) he described himself as: "Tall, ugly, thin, red-haired, but not, methinks, especially stupid."

Shortly after Lewis graduated from Yale he was earning a good living as a writer. Although he traveled abroad, he spent lots of time in Minnesota, living on St. Paul's Summit Avenue and Lake Minnetonka, as well as Mankato, Gull Lake, Rainy Lake and the Gunflint Trail. He was in Duluth from 1944 to '46, working on "Cass Timberlane" and "Kingsblood Royal."

"Lewis was no ex-pat," Coleman says. "He came back to Minnesota all the time. He was happy to get out of here but loved the physical place, especially the North Shore."

The Main Street exhibit includes facsimiles of Lewis' manuscripts, typed on a little Corona typewriter, which show his work process. Long sections are crossed out and there are handwritten additions, including adjectives he tried and rejected.

Lewis private life is on display, too. There's a copy of "With Love from Gracie," a memoir of courtship, marriage and divorce written by his first wife, Grace Livingston Hegger, to whom he was married from 1914 to 1923. Their divorce papers show that Grace received $1,000 a month and Lewis set up a $50,000 trust fund for their son, Wells, who was killed in World War II.

In another picture, Lewis is with his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, and their son, Michael, who died in 1975. Thompson, an internationally-known war correspondent who warned of Hitler's coming threat, was the first reporter thrown out of Nazi Germany.

Lewis had always been a drinker, but some speculate that being married to a prominent woman like Thompson made his insecurities deeper. They were the country's first two-career celebrity couple, inspiring the film "Woman of the Year" starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Thompson was also one of the inspirations for Lewis' 1933 novel "Ann Vickers," about a woman who tries to reform a women's prison.

HE WORE PEOPLE OUT

There's plenty of lit-crit dissecting Lewis's writing, but what about the man, who was variously described as restless, exasperating, having a need to be loved?

"Lewis' personality is hard to get a handle on," Coleman says. "Drinking dictated his mood. When he was invited to dinner parties he was either sitting in a corner or standing and entertaining for hours. People got tired of both. Margaret Culkin Banning, an author better known than he was as the time, arranged a party for him in Duluth. He never showed up."

Scott Eyman, author and critic, writes: "Part of Lewis' problem with posterity may be that he was, personally, Not a Nice Man. It's not an unusual trait for a writer, but Lewis was unattractive in a particularly toxic, unglamorous way."

Lewis loved to act. A big picture on the wall of the MNHS exhibit shows him playing a priest in a 1940 production of "Shadow and Substance." Kneeling in front of him in a pleading pose is Marcella Powers, his much-younger companion later in life.

None of the pictures of Lewis in the exhibit, whether formal author photos or news shots, shows his ravaged face, with deep acne scars and tightness from radium treatments.

Ernest Hemingway, who Lewis called "puerile" and "senile," got back at Lewis in his nonfiction ode to hunting, "Across the River and Into the Trees." In that book a character, (assumed to be Lewis) is seen as having "a strange face like an over-enlarged, disappointed weasel or ferret. It looked as pock-marked and as blemished as the mountains of the moon seen through a cheap telescope."

Biographer Lingeman says Lewis' looks influenced his personality and made him very self-conscious. "He was a sensitive person who had this feeling of being unworthy anyway, and he felt that people were repelled by his face so he couldn't trust them when they expressed affection."

But his mind could trump his face. Dorothy Thompson felt sorry for him when they first met, but she said that after 15 minutes of talking to him she forgot about his looks.

POPULAR CULTURE AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

One of the most popular parts of the Lewis exhibit is a seven-minute video of trailers from most popular films made from Lewis' novels. "I hope I'm not driving people to Netflix instead of the public library," Pat Coleman jokes about highlighting another art form.

Nine of Lewis' books were made into movies; three were made twice. A-list actors headlined all of them.

"Ann Vickers" starred Irene Dunne, Ronald Coleman was in "Arrowsmith," Guy Kibbee was Babbitt, and Walter Huston headlines "Dodsworth." Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner and Zachary Scott were in "Cass Timberlane," and who can forget Burt Lancaster praying and sweating his way through "Elmer Gantry"? That film won three Academy Awards, for best adapted screenplay, best actor (Lancaster) and Shirley Jones as best supporting actress.

Ask Pat Coleman what he's proudest of in the exhibit and he points to what he calls The Wall of Books, a display of some 300 editions of Lewis' books in English and foreign languages, including 150,000 first editions.

"I wanted to make the point that Lewis' influence is over a long period of time and geography," Coleman said. Some displayed books are from the MNHS collection that Coleman has been gathering for 43 years, others are borrowed from St. Cloud State University and the Sinclair Lewis Foundation in Sauk Centre. Foreign language editions are from the University of Minnesota Lewis collection.

Coleman sees the Wall of Books as showing both the history of the book and of design, tracing the way cover illustrations changed through various editions as the country's tastes changed. Some covers have no illustrations. Others are noir-ish or downright sexy. Even if you can't read the language on the foreign edition jackets, you get a sense of what kind of artwork those publishers thought would attract readers.

Some of the books are inscribed by Lewis, including one to L.M. Birkhead, a Unitarian adviser to Lewis when he was working on "Elmer Gantry."

"To L.M. and Agnes Birkhead, without whom I could never have written the sacred treatise," Lewis wrote, adding a poke at William Bell Riley, the anti-semitic founder of the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota.

SINCLAIR LEWIS — AGAIN

Sinclair Lewis became a bestseller again in 2017, when Penguin published a new edition of his 1935 dystopian satire "It Can't Happen Here" on the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. Many readers saw similarities between the novel's protagonist and the new president.

"It Can't Happen Here" is the story of the rise of Sen. Windrip, a lying politician and entertainer, elected president on promises of wealth to Americans still reeling from the Depression. He's a "blustering, buffoonish, demagogue" who promises to restore American greatness.

Taking complete control of the government, Windrip squashes dissent and jails his opponents, staying in power with the backing of a paramilitary made up of middle-class men.

A SAD END

Lewis spent his last years in Europe, often drunk, having alienated most of his friends. He died at age 65 of a heart attack brought on by advanced alcoholism on Jan. 10, 1951. Although his star had eclipsed, his passing made international news.

One of the most touching pieces in the Main Street exhibit is a blow-up of an Associated Press picture taken at Lewis' funeral in the cemetery less than a mile from Main Street. It was 22 degrees below zero that day, and when his brother Claude tipped ashes from the urn, some were scattered by the wind. It's nice to think that a few might have floated onto Sauk Centre, returning Lewis to his birthplace.

Towering above others at the grave was Lewis' young friend, Minnesota writer Feike Feikema (later known as Fred Manfred), who gave the eulogy. He called Lewis "an honest man, a man who loved justice."

(The autobiography/biography quoted above was written at the time of the (Nobel) award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.)

'SINCLAIR LEWIS: 100 YEARS OF MAIN STREET'

— What: More than 300 items from the MNHS collections, the Sinclair Lewis Foundation and other lenders.

— When: On exhibit now

— Where: Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul

— Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sundays

— Tickets: $12-$8, members free; timed entry, available at mnhs.org or by calling the box office at 651-259-3015.