The novelist who saw middle america as it really was

Is Babbitt a comic book character? A tragic character? Just an inventory figure from what Lewis’ friend and mentor HL Mencken labeled “booboisie”? The success of “Babbitt” is that we will not confidently answer that question. Babbitt’s identity entered the language – a “Babbitt” is a ludicrous conformist living in a ridiculously small-minded world. But ultimately, Lewis’ Babbitt is someone we care about – more of a moderate personality than a caricature – one of a small group of American works of fiction who, in their early years of the twentieth century, is considered a very different milestone for them. in the story of our nation’s social evolution: Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Wharton’s Lily Bart, Sales Space’s Alice Adams, with Gatsby on the horizon.

Is Babbitt a comic book character? A tragic character? The success of “Babbitt” is that we will not confidently answer that question.

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885. His father was an excellent doctor in Central Sauk, a city of about 2,800 inhabitants – learn all about it in “Main Street”. Fred, the oldest of the doctor’s three sons, grew up to be a miller and was left completely unscathed throughout the daring Lewis clan. Claude, the oldest then, had significant consequences: He grew up to be a brilliant, admired surgeon and wanted to make his way through the town of St. Cloud, where he spent his adult life. When Lewis was 62 years old, he admitted that “for 60 years, I’ve been trying to impress my brother Claude.” recognized as “Sinclair”, his middle name. He was Harry, later Hal, and finally “Red” to everyone who knew him. He is not physically younger than before. “He was nearly six feet tall before he was 16,” writes his aerial biographer Mark Schorer, “with a short torso on very long and skinny legs, and a weight of only 120 pounds; thin and thin, but with a puffy, acne-filled face (they say ‘acne’), large feet and hands, poorly coordinated in his movements, everything about his body hangs and swaying and wobbling and tripping, and bandages–the rather protruding blue (psychotic) eyes, all covered with carrot-colored wigs. “Nor did he have the regular outdoor fun of his youth – skating, swimming, duck hunting – he later claimed to have; Schorer made that clear. “He’s a weird guy with only one real friend in a town full of boys, laughed at by girls.” Sports activities? No. Dance? “Since I can’t dance, I just went with Ma to take a look.” However, a lot of traditions are passed on by the city: naval bands; Ski-U-Mah Quartette; Maharas Minstrels; Membership of the Schubert Symphony; The Casgrove Company performed with musical glasses, sleigh bells, mandolins and banjos; and traveling theatrical occasions, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to Jolly Della Pringle Firm.Read more: Nia Peeples biography: age, spouse, children, martial arts, net worth His father has a letter humble hospital, and young Harry started buying books on his personal site. (His favorite writers as a boy were Dickens, Scott, and Kipling, and he continued to study them throughout his life.) For many years he was a rotten student, until the end of high school, he started to shine. He is a notorious clipper, an imitator and a proud writer of “class screams”: “Cooma laca, booma laca, / Bow wow wow – / Chingalaca, chingalaca, / Chow, Chow, Chow.” He’s had a crush on one girl after another – usually two at the same time. He does housework, he has a summer job. And he submitted flowery poems to various magazines, but all were rejected. However, he was also preparing for the faculty, determined to try for Yale, and after spending some time at Oberlin honing his abilities, he was accepted there. His only distinction was in regular print in the Yale Literary Review, “The Lit” – romantic stories, flowery poems. Women? Gauche tries. Best friend? Just a few. Intimate? Hard. The venerable educator William Lyon Phelps said of him, “He was not hated in college, but was regarded as mildly tolerant as a freak.” His emotional state? As always, lonely. But he took a risk: once a summer, delivering cattle on a cattle steamer to England; one fall, the guide goes to Panama, finds work there. Then just a few years of wandering – a neighborhood of famous artists in Carmel, a short in a San Francisco newspaper, the utopian colony of Upton Sinclair in New Jersey. Finally, New York, where he lived in Greenwich Village and had sympathetic friends like Edna Ferber and Frances Perkins, who would become FDR’s famous labor secretary. He earns only a few {dollars} by promoting junk magazine issues to junk magazines and newspapers, and he is promoting story plots to established writers: Jack London, one person, in a single transaction, paid him $70 for 14 story ideas, and Albert Payson Terhune (“Lad: A Dog”) for additional. And he started writing his first novel, “Our Lord Wrenn.” Read more: Aranyak is a murderer