I just got back from a trip, on which I read “Free Air.” It’s absolutely amazing. He wrote several books like it – “Our Mr Wren,” “World So Wide,” a couple of others. They’re almost like Jane Austen – light on plot, very heavy on characters, what goes on inside their heads, their positions in society, stuff like that.
I also like some of his “heavier” books, like “Babbitt” but some I find go a bit overboard, like “Elmer Gantry” and “Main Street.” I LOVED “Kingsblood Royal.”
I think I’m about 2/3 the way through his works. Am definitely looking forward to the rest.
I just read “Elmer Gantry.” Yeah, it’s overboard to the point where he probably loses much of his congregation, and winds up preaching to the choir, to use a metaphor that isn’t apt, but, had he toned it down, he makes some rather solid observations about human nature, amid it all.
I get them mixed up too. I think I’ve read the ones that go “overboard” but none of the others. I’ll have to look into those. It’s interesting that the ones he is most famous for (I think) are the ones that you don’t like as much, except for Babbit. I know I must not have enjoyed the ones I read too much, or I would have read more by him. I’ll have to try some of these others.
An apt description of Sinclair Lewis. His socialist ideals really came through in some of his books. I don’t generally let that get in the way of my enjoying his books.
I was wondering why so many people confuse them – people don’t confuse, say, Paul McCartney and Les Paul. I had always thought of Upton Sinclair as a one-hit wonder, with one decent book that’s more journalism than literature (I still do), while Sinclair Lewis was one of the US’s greatest writers, one of our few Nobel Prize winners in literature. Then I looked up Upton. He founded a socialist artist’s colony, and one of the early writers to live there was Sinclair Lewis.