Sinclair Lewis

Features the story of a college graduate from St. Paul who leaves to marry a doctor in a small, middle-class town, only to find her efforts to bring culture and beauty to the town thwarted by its residents, testing her idealism.

“The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal.”—Salon
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression,...

A vulgar and licentious college football captain becomes a messenger of God as a suave evangelist preacher.

"Free Air" is a novel written by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1919. It's one of the first novels to celebrate the adventure and freedom that road trips introduced to America at the start of the twentieth century, thanks to the invention of the automobile. The story revolves around Claire Boltwood, a rich young woman from Brooklyn, and her father who drive across the country to help him regain his health. Travel by automobile in the first part of the...

"The Prodigal Parents" is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The story revolves around a typical middle-class family of four and is about the revolt of the parents against the revolt of youth. The daughter, inclined towards communism, and the hard-drinking brother want their mother and father to continue to support them.

Virginia Marshland is a vivacious young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, whose rebellious ways fascinate small town widowed judge Cass Timberlane. He's lonely enough to believe that his stuffy friends will accept her, and their marriage. But Virginia is too spirited to play the part of a dutiful society wife for long, and soon becomes tempted by a friend of Timberlane's, a man about town who seems to offer the sophistication and adventure...