The Serialized Novels of Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis 29 M A R T I N BUGCO Colorado State University The Serialized Novels of Sinclair Lewis Contrary Sinclair Lewis owed much of his phenomenal literary success and failure to popular American magazine fiction. As far back as 1910, while hacking in the dream factories of the East, this raw Middle Westerner brooded over his hometown and his alma mater—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and Yale University—and yearned for fame and fortune. Restless and tormented, he seemed always out of tune with people and places. When not playing the role of medieval lyricist or prairie euphuist, he contributed to the slow displacement of good fiction in magazines by cynically turning out, as he once confessed, “a swell piece of cheese to grab off some easy gravy.”1 But what editors of the big slicks balked at, many xThe Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York, 1932), p. 16. literary critics admired; and what the critics denounced, magazine editors praised. Nowhere is Sinclair Lewis’ split sensibility more visible than in a collation of his serials and books.2 In addition to casting into the Dead Sea of literary mercantilism more than a hundred short stories, Lewis also tossed in seven serial novels, later revised and published in book form. For $1000 and Woman’s Home Com­ panion (“Service to the Modem Home”), he potboiled in two installments the Pickwickian travels of “The Innocents” (FebruarySI have treated the subject comprehensively in The Serialized Novels of Sinclair Lewis: A Comparative Analysis of Serial and Book (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Missouri, 1963). Also, I have examined intermediate manuscripts among the Sinclair Lewis Papers, Yale University Library. For early suggestions I am indebted to Mark Schorer and, of course, to his monumental Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York, 1961); useful in its compactness is Sheldon Norman Grebstem’s Sinclair Lewis, TUSAS (New York, 1962). 30 Western American Literature March, 1917), his fourth novel (The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, 1917). When Saturday Evening Post, which earlier had rejected “The Innocents” as too bathetic, bid for stories of American ro­ mance and adventure—of Horatio Alger types scurrying up the ladder of material success—Lewis rehashed three articles (“Ad­ ventures in Autobumming”) based on his four-month tour of the American West in a Model T Ford and sold his four-part serial, “Free-Air” (May 31-June 21, 1919), and its two-part sequel, “Danger-—Run Slow” (October 18-25, 1919); both constituted the frame for his fifth novel (Free Air, 1919) and the inspiration for his unserialized Main Street (1920). To Designer and the Woman’s Magazine the now famous writer sold for $50,000 his shorter version of the modem pioneer spirit in eleven installments of “Dr. Martin Arrowsmith” (June, 1924-April, 1925), afterwards published as Lewis’ eighth novel (Arrowsmith, 1925). In 1926, for $42,500, the die-hard magazinist answered the call of Collier’s Weekly for more action and more obvious motivation with twelve installments of his shoddy Western Canadian melodrama, “Mantrap” (February 13-May 8), his ninth novel (Mantrap, 1926). After Sinclair Lewis accepted the Nobel Prize in 1930, he resolved to create in the Great Tradition; but, still composing with one eye on the serial market, he granted first publication and bowdlerization rights to affluent Redbook Magazine (August, 1932-January, 1933), Cos­ mopolitan Magazine (May-October, 1945), and—the wheel comes full circle—Woman’s Home Companion (January-February, 1951) for, respectively: his thirteenth novel (Ann Vickers, 1933), nine­ teenth novel (Cass Timberlane, 1945), and twenty-second and last novel (World So Wide, 1951). Since their readers craved uncomplicated narratives, magazine editors consistently objected to the best thing in Lewis—his social satire. Nimble in the calling of pleasing the flesh-and-blood counter­ parts of Mrs. Babbitt, serial editors and author expunged the gargantuan sniping, lashing, carping, smearing, grumbling, and general denouncing. The trick: to alienate or to insult no one, especially middle-class Americans who admired middle-class Ameri­ cans. For example, in Lewis’ weary “World So Wide,” with its soporific irony (American hero travels to strange land, meets strange woman, but in the end marries familiar girl next door), the Com...