Search results for ""author sinclair lewis""

In the Midwestern city of Zenith, the middle-aged estate agent George F. Babbitt appears to have achieved the American dream to its fullest: he is successful at work, comfortably off, exceedingly well fed, has a wife and children, a motor car and a neat house with a neat yard, and is a proud member of all the right clubs - in short, he lacks nothing to be happy. Or does he? As we follow his humdrum daily routine and startling events begin to unfold around him, we discover that all is not well in Babbitt's world: his moral foundations are shaking, and he can't help harbouring rebellious dreams of escape and romance. A trenchant satire on consumeristic society and an indictment of the fatuous ideals of middle America in the Roaring Twenties, Babbitt - the crowning achievement of Sinclair Lewis, winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature - questions the attractions of materialistic fulfilment, at the same time laying bare the hollowness of social respectability and blind conformism.

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Martin Arrowsmith, a young medical student at the University of Winnemac, is driven by a sincere passion and a desire to make a positive contribution to the world. But events get in the way, and a series of personal vicissitudes, love interests and societal pressures threaten to lead him away from the path of pure science until he is forced, in the face of a humanitarian crisis, to decide between scientific rigour and compassion, between maintaining his medical principles and saving lives.First published in 1925 to great critical acclaim, Arrowsmith is the third major novel by Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street and Babbitt, and arguably his most ambitious work. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1926 which the author famously declined it contributed to Lewis''s growing reputation as a master storyteller, social commentator and the unsurpassed satirist of his time.

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Young college graduate Carol Kennicott moves from a big city to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, the small town from which her new husband hails. Imbued with ideals of urban improvement, she dreams of redesigning her adopted village, but her efforts are thwarted by the narrow-mindedness, pettiness and conventionality of the locals, who conspire against her and deride all her endeavours. An enormous commercial and critical success on its first publication in 1920, Main Street – regarded by many as Sinclair Lewis’s best novel – delivers a scathing satire on the American dream, and is invaluable as a document of pre-Prohibition Middle America.

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'An eerily prescient foreshadowing of current affairs' Guardian'Not only Lewis's most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in the United States' New YorkerA vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, 'Professional Common Man', who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path. As the new regime slides into authoritarianism, newspaper editor Doremus Jessup can't believe it will last - but is he right? This cautionary tale of liberal complacency in the face of populist tyranny shows it really can happen here.

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BY THE AUTHOR OF IT CAN'T HAPPEN HEREBusinessman George F. Babbitt loves the latest appliances, making money and the Republican party. In fact, he loves being a Solid Citizen even more than he loves his wife. But Babbitt comes to resent the middle class trappings he has worked so hard to acquire. Realising that his life is devoid of meaning, he grows determined to transcend his trivial existence and search for a greater purpose. In the economic boom years of 1920s' America, Babbitt became a symbol of middle-class mediocrity, and his name an enduring part of the American lexicon.

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Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and a writer lauded both for his craft and his principles, wrote The Job as a statement of female empowerment, and self-determination over societal expectation. Written in the early years of the 1900s Lewis' central character, highly unusual for the era, is a woman, Una Golden, who gains work in an exclusively male world of commercial real estate. Golden struggles for the recognition of her male peers while balancing romantic and work life; she marries, divorces, continues to work hard and finally emerges triumphant on her own terms. Flame Tree 451 presents a new series, The Foundations of Feminist Fiction. The early 1900s saw a quiet revolution in literature dominated by male adventure heroes. Both men and women moved beyond the norms of the male gaze to write from a different gender perspective, sometimes with female protagonists, but also expressing the universal freedom to write on any subject whatsoever. Each book features a brand new biography and a new glossary of Literary, Gothic and Victorian terms.

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Raised on tales of her revolutionary ancestors, Frances Perkins arrives in New York City at the turn of the century, armed with her trusty parasol and an unyielding determination to make a difference. When she''s not working with children in the crowded tenements in Hell''s Kitchen, Frances throws herself into the social scene in Greenwich Village, befriending an eclectic group of politicians, artists, and activists, including the millionaire socialite Mary Harriman Rumsey, the flirtatious budding author Sinclair Lewis, and the brilliant but troubled reformer Paul Wilson, with whom she falls deeply in love. But when Frances meets a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a tea dance, sparks fly in all the wrong directions. She thinks he''s a rich, arrogant dilettante who gets by on a handsome face and a famous name. He thinks she''s a priggish bluestocking and insufferable do-gooder. Neither knows it yet, but over the next twenty years, they will form a historic partnership tha

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