Arrowsmith (Lewis)

Arrowsmith 
Sinclair Lewis, 1925
CreateSpace
316 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781452849102


Summary
Winner, 1926 Pulitzer Prize
New York Times Book of the Century

The Pulitzer Prize winning Arrowsmith (an award Lewis refused to accept) recounts the story of a doctor who is forced to give up his trade for reasons ranging from public ignorance to the publicity-mindedness of a great foundation, and becomes an isolated seeker of scientific truth. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—February 7, 1885
• Where—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
• Death—January 10, 1951
• Where—Rome Italy
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Pulitzer Prize

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as for their strong characterizations of modern working women.

Born in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. He had two siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat popeyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War.

Early life and writings
Lewis entered Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses (and for a time at the Carmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony), he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Marriage and family
In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis (1917–1944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Wells Lewis was killed while serving in the military in World War II.

Lewis divorced Grace in 1925 and married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist, in 1928. They had a son, Michael Lewis, in 1930. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they divorced in 1942. Michael Lewis became an actor, and died in 1975 at age 44.

Success
Upon moving to Washington, D.C., Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, Lewis began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published in 1920. As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis's most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million. According to Richard Lingeman, Main Street earned Lewis the equivalent of $3 million in 2002 dollars.

Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis would return in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about the challenges faced by an idealistic doctor. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis refused). Adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman, it was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Next came Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted an evangelical minister as deeply hypocritical. The novel was denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S. cities. Adapted for the screen more than a generation later, the novel was the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. The book was adapted for the Broadway stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film version. Directed by William Wyler and a great success at the time, the film is still highly regarded. In 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and in 2005 Time magazine named it one of the "100 Best Movies" of the past 80 years.

Alcoholism
After an alcoholic binge in 1937, Lewis checked into the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for treatment. His doctors gave Lewis a blunt assessment that he needed to decide "whether he was going to live without alcohol or die by it, one or the other." Lewis checked out after 10 days, lacking, one of his physicians wrote to a colleague, any "fundamental understanding of his problem."

Nobel Prize
In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us — not readers alone, but even writers — are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today." He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

Later years and death
After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis wrote eleven more novels, ten of which appeared in his lifetime. The best remembered is It Can't Happen Here, a novel about the election of a fascist to the American presidency.

Lewis died in Rome on January 10, 1951, aged 65, from advanced alcoholism, although his friend and admirer, William Shirer, says he simply had a heart attack. Lewis's cremated remains were buried in Sauk Centre. A final novel, World So Wide (1951), was published posthumously.

In summing up Lewis' career, Shirer concludes, "It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to...Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner...Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life...was greater than all of the other four writers together." (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
(Classic works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

Artistically, Arrowsmith is an authentic step forward. The novel is full of passages of a quite noble felicity and the old skill in presenting character through dialogue never fails.
Henry Longan Stuart - New York Times (3/8/1925)

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Arrowsmith:

1. How does Martin view Winnemac Medical School? What does he find fault with? How do his views differ from those of his classmates?

2. Talk about Madeleine—what kind of young woman is she? Why does Martin turn to her initially, and why does he want to marry her? Why does Martin tell Madeleine that he would work to become a successful surgeon, the very thing he has criticized?

3. Describe Leora—in what ways is she different from Madeleine? Why is Martin attracted to her? And what about the luncheon to which Martin invites both Leora and Madeleine!

4. Martin Arrowsmith, the book's hero: what do you think of him—what kind of character is he? Is he steadfast in his principles or vacillate with the wind? Is he an arrogant know-it-all, or a callow young man who has yet to achieve maturity?

5. Sinclair Lewis can be unmercifully funny—but always to make a point. How, for instance, does he use the character of Roscoe Geake to criticize the medical establishment? (What of Geake's speech, "The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor's Office"?) On who or what else does Lewis train his satiric eye (don't overlook the Nautilis Health Fair)?

6. Does Martin deserve his suspension from medical school? Was he rude and arrogant, or standing on principle? After he returns to school, how and why is he changed?

7. Talk about Gottlieb's experience working at Hunziker in Pittsburgh. Why does he take the position; is it an ethical compromise on his part? How does Martin react when he learns of Gottlieb's position? Are the pressures facing Gottlieb prevalent today?

8. Martin's first position out of medical school is a country doctor? What kind of doctor does he make...and why can't he win the trust of the townspeople? Why does Martin become dissatisfied in Wheatsylvania? What is he seeking there that he cannot find? In what way is Sinclair Lewis using Wheatsylvania as a critique of small town America? Do you think his portrait is fair or unfair?

9. Martin eventually becomes acting director of public health in Nautilis, but again controversy and unpopularity seek him out. What's wrong in Nautilis? Is Martin the maker of his own conflict...or is he a true reformer in a corrupt system?

10. After a stop in Chicago, Martin ends up at the McGurk Institute in New York with his old mentor Max Gottlieb. What problematic issues arise in this environment? Again, what is Sinclair Lewis training his critical eye on this time?

11. What are the differences between Tubbs and Gottlieb? What does each represent in the world of science and medicine?

12.. What does Martin learn from Oliver Marchand when the McGurk commission travels to St. Hubert?

13. What role do women play in this novel? How does Lewis portray them? Are they men's equals?

14. Is Martin right to withhold phage from people who are desperately ill? In what way is this issue relevant today?

15. The narrator says in Chapter 36, "the papers were able to announce that America, which was always rescuing the world from something or other, had gone and done it again." Is that a fair assessment of America's position in the world? Is it relevant to today? Does America try to be the world's savior?

SPOILER alert: Go no farther unless you've finished the book.

16. Is Leora's death necessary in this story? Did you feel her loss?

17. Throughout the novel, Martin is a seeker. Still, is his final act justified—that of abandoning his family and retreating into the woods of Vermont to pursue pure research?

18. What has changed, from from the early 20th century to today, in the way medicine and medical research are practiced? What has not changed—what issues addressed in Arrowsmith continue to plague science and medicine 100 years later?

19. Does this novel end on an optimistic...or pessimistic note?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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