The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930 by James Hutchisson (review)

76 Western American Literature gist George Romanes, and (possibly) the early animal rights theoretician Henry Salt. As a result of this intellectual cross-fertilization, what began as “a mere anecdote, told to friends as an after-dinner story over cigars and good wine” evolved “into a larger study of animal behavior and its lessons for humanity.” Muir came to see the tale as an opportunity to introduce radical ideas about “the moral equality of dogs and men and all other ele­ ments in the endless span of creation,” “to challenge traditional attitudes in an inoffensive way.” Limbaugh’s writing is lucid and succinct. Muir scholars will value this book not only for its argument, but also for the hard-to-find variants of “Stickeen” that it reprints in their entirety: the original journal passage upon which the story was based, the final manuscript version of 1897, and a children’s version written by Emily Swett Parkhurst. DAVID MAZEL University of West Alabama The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930. By James Hutchisson. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 276 pages, $29.50.) Renewed interest in Sinclair Lewis moves apace. This solid study treats the genesis, development, composition, and reception of the five major (and two minor) novels that Lewis published during his great decade of the 1920s. Along with five chapters devoted to Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Mantrap, Elmer Gantry, The Man Who Knew Coolidge, and Dodsworth, Hutchisson, in a sixth chapter, discusses the author’s “unfinished labor novel” and his capturing the Nobel Prize in 1930. The appendixes avail us of Lewis’s excinded chapter from Main Street, his New York Evening Post article “The Pioneer Myth,” his deleted introduction to Babbitt, Hugh Walpole’s published introduction to the British edition of Babbitt, and two less ensconced documents of the decade—Lewis’s notorious letter refusing the Pulitzer Prize and his cele­ brated speech accepting the Nobel Prize. Besides useful notes, a bibliog­ raphy, and index, the volume has thirty-two illustrations: interesting examples of Lewis’s jottings, lists, maps, floor plans, timetables, brochures, manuscripts, typescripts, and galley proofs. Despite the continuing efficacy of Sinclair Lewis’s twenty-two satir­ ic novels for American and western American literature, scholarship, as Hutchisson notes, is relatively “scant.” For a long time students had assumed that after the publication of Sinclair Lewis: An American Life Reviews 11 (1961), Mark Schorer’s “official”jumbo biography allowed but little crit­ ical grass to grow. Among the Lewis Papers at Yale University and the University of Texas, however, is material underlying Lewis’s novels that Schorer by and large disregarded. Taking his cue from Malcolm Cowley, Hutchisson considers these documents and, rather than dwelling on Lewis’s failures after 1930, tries to explain the “height and nature” of Lewis’s achievement. Grounded in sound scholarship and sustained by clear thought, Hutchisson’s interpretation as to why Lewis made such a profound impact on his contemporaries is entirely plausible. In showing the transformation of Lewis’s notes, drafts, and the several versions of a fiction into its pub­ lished form, the critic-historian reveals how Lewis came to write a partic­ ular novel, how that novel helped shape Lewis’s career, and how each novel, in turn, influenced the work in progress. This story of Lewis’s com­ positional methods in the 1920s in the context of his development at the time provides continuities and perspectives, while the account of how his novels were received makes for amplitude and point. Combined with Hutchisson’s treatment of Lewis’s ties with Alfred Harcourt, the story also constitutes a chapter in the history of American book publishing. For all its specialized detail, each chapter is coherent, and the book as a whole (barring a few redundancies) is highly unified. And though sym­ pathetic to Lewis’s literary art, Hutchisson remains aware of Lewis’s often cheeky botchery. The intent of this study is not only refreshing but seems to me realized: to explain a phenomenon rather than to advance a cause. MARTIN BUCCO Colorado State University Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self. By Bruce Michaelson. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1995...