Thoughts On The Rebellious Spirit In Singlair Lewis's Main Street And Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951), one of the greatest writers in American literature, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, the first given to American. In choosing Lewis over Theodore Dreiser and other American writers, the Academy was most impressed by the typicality and representative of Lewis's fictional creations, and by the artistic and affirmative qualities in Lewis's work, as well as its more famous satire and critical realism. These qualities have raised American literature to a place among the world's literature. Lewis helps to discover"real America"and clear any vestiges of the genteel tradition and popular romanticism out of the way so that a greater freedom both in technique and theme is ensured for the younger, rising generation. He refuses to see America in the sugar-coated, idealistic terms favored at the turn of the 19th century and denunciates the worst aspects of American life: provincialism, complacency and smugness with his broadly drawn, widely popular satirical novels. He is the observer and commentator of the many-sided life of his time; he is a satirist, critic and judge of that age.Lewis's achievements lie mainly on the five satiric novels that he produced in the 1920s. Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) are...