From Publishers Weekly
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) lived in an era of American literary giants: there was Dreiser (whose life Lingeman has also written), James, Wharton and Hemingway, just to name a few. But Lewis himself is remembered as an author of middling distinction who achieved celebrity with pointed satires of American mores, particularly in Main Street, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Lingeman's absorbing biography, however, makes critics's offhand treatment of Lewis seem misplaced. A brash Midwesterner with a mile-wide goofball streak, Lewis turns out to have lived loudly, expansively and generously far from the dour personality one might expect of a satirist. Possessed of limitless energy and generally pragmatic about hackwork, he poured forth reams of print all his life. His quest for a true American realism was earnest though not always successful. At his best, as in Main Street, he provided razor-sharp criticism of a nation greatly in need of self-caricature. He turned down a Pulitzer Prize and accepted a Nobel. He exasperated his two wives, explored radical politics without committing himself and was felled by alcoholism; Lewis's story in these respects shares much with that of other writers. Lingeman, a senior editor at the Nation, succeeds in capturing the giddy, forward progression of Lewis's life, full of obsessions and accidents; it's only at the end that one realizes that one has finished a tragedy. Although relatively few readers may set out to read a life of Sinclair Lewis, this well-crafted biography holds many rewards for those who find it. Agent, Virginia Barber. (On-sale: Jan. 15)Forecast: Thanks to the reputation Lingeman established with his acclaimed life of Dreiser, this will receive widespread review attention, which may draw more than the usual number of readers for a literary bio.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Having assayed a two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, Nation contributor Lingeman turns his attention to America's first Nobel prize winner. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Dreiser biographer Lingeman reprises the life and work of the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Sinclair Lewis (1895-1951). He was born and raised in a small Minnesota town, and he was tall and gangly, with blue laserlike eyes, skin ravaged by acne and radium treatments, a "phonographic" memory, and a "real moral passion." A regular short story contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, he became frustrated with the editor's conservatism and, inspired by his extensive travels and shrewd insights into the rapidly evolving zeitgeist of the heady 1920s, began writing cataclysmic novels. He skewered provincialism in Main Street, business and boosterism in Babbitt, religion in Elmer Gantry, fascism in It Can't Happen Here, and racism in Kingsblood Royal, becoming hugely famous and enormously controversial. Lingeman, reserved yet commanding, presents the first balanced, in-depth portrait of Lewis--an eccentric, workaholic, and alcoholic writer afraid of emotion but willing to outrage the entire country, and a man who believed in equal rights for women but couldn't cope with the success of his second wife, the preeminent journalist Dorothy Thompson--thus reminding readers of just how powerful fiction can be and how arduous the writing life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"As a sequel to his magisterial biography of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Lingeman has put forth, at long last, the definitive life of Sinclair Lewis, the other genius-curmudgeon of our literature. It's a touch of fate, I think, that Lingeman, out of midwestern provincial Crawfordsville, is just the boy to celebrate the scourges of our sacrosanct, who came from equally endowed American towns, Terre Haute and Sauk Centre. No New Yorker could possibly have written these books. Lingeman's biography of Lewis, as well as the other, has that unique tribute - "the feeling tone."

- Studs Terkel

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The critic Edmund Wilson called Sinclair Lewis “one of the national poets.” In the 1920s, Lewis fired off a fusillade of sensational novels, exploding American shibboleths with a volatile mixture of caricature and photographic realism. With an unerring eye for the American scene and an omnivorous ear for American talk, he mocked such sacrosanct institutions as the small town (Main Street), business (Babbitt), medicine (Arrowsmith), and religion (Elmer Gantry). His shrewdly observed characters became part of the American gallery, and his titles became part of the language.

Despite his books’ innate subversiveness, they were bestsellers and widely discussed—–and almost as widely damned. They had small-towners worried about being called “Main Streeters,” preachers fearful of being branded “Elmer Gantrys,” and Babbitts defiant of being labeled “Babbitts.” Lewis touched a nerve among Americans who secretly yearned for something more from life than hustling, making money, and buying new cars.

Lewis danced along the fault line between the old, small-town, frugal, conservative, fundamentalist America and the modernist, big-business-dominated, youth-obsessed, advertising-powered consumer society that was reshaping the American character in the iconoclastic 1920s.

For all his use of humor and satire, Lewis probed serious themes: feminism (The Job, Main Street, Ann Vickers), commercial pressures on science (Arrowsmith), racial prejudice (Kingsblood Royal), and native fascism (It Can’t Happen Here). In 1930, he became the first Americanto win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he feared he could never live up to it. In his heart, he was a scold with a conscience, a harsh truth-teller who laughed out loud. His novels, born out of a passionate conviction that America could be better, are thus as alive today as when they were written.

Bringing to bear newly uncovered correspondence, diaries, and criticism, Richard Lingeman, distinguished biographer of Theodore Dreiser, paints a sympathetic portrait—–in all its multihued contradictions—–of a seminal American writer who could be inwardly the loneliest of men and outwardly as gregarious as George Follansbee Babbitt himself. Lingeman writes with sympathy and understanding about Lewis’s losing struggle with alcoholism; his stormy marriages, including one to the superwoman Dorothy Thompson, whose fame as a newspaper columnist in the 1930s outshone Lewis’s fading star as a novelist; and his wistful, autumnal love for an actress more than thirty years younger than he.

Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street evokes with color and verve the gaudy life and times of this prairie Mercutio out of Sauk Centre, Minnesota.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) lived in an era of American literary giants: there was Dreiser (whose life Lingeman has also written), James, Wharton and Hemingway, just to name a few. But Lewis himself is remembered as an author of middling distinction who achieved celebrity with pointed satires of American mores, particularly in Main Street, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Lingeman's absorbing biography, however, makes critics's offhand treatment of Lewis seem misplaced. A brash Midwesterner with a mile-wide goofball streak, Lewis turns out to have lived loudly, expansively and generously far from the dour personality one might expect of a satirist. Possessed of limitless energy and generally pragmatic about hackwork, he poured forth reams of print all his life. His quest for a true American realism was earnest though not always successful. At his best, as in Main Street, he provided razor-sharp criticism of a nation greatly in need of self-caricature. He turned down a Pulitzer Prize and accepted a Nobel. He exasperated his two wives, explored radical politics without committing himself and was felled by alcoholism; Lewis's story in these respects shares much with that of other writers. Lingeman, a senior editor at the Nation, succeeds in capturing the giddy, forward progression of Lewis's life, full of obsessions and accidents; it's only at the end that one realizes that one has finished a tragedy. Although relatively few readers may set out to read a life of Sinclair Lewis, this well-crafted biography holds many rewards for those who find it. Agent, Virginia Barber. (On-sale: Jan. 15) Forecast: Thanks to the reputation Lingeman established with his acclaimed life of Dreiser, this will receive widespread review attention, which may draw more than the usual number of readers for a literary bio. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) lived in an era of American literary giants: there was Dreiser (whose life Lingeman has also written), James, Wharton and Hemingway, just to name a few. But Lewis himself is remembered as an author of middling distinction who achieved celebrity with pointed satires of American mores, particularly in Main Street, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Lingeman's absorbing biography, however, makes critics's offhand treatment of Lewis seem misplaced. A brash Midwesterner with a mile-wide goofball streak, Lewis turns out to have lived loudly, expansively and generously far from the dour personality one might expect of a satirist. Possessed of limitless energy and generally pragmatic about hackwork, he poured forth reams of print all his life. His quest for a true American realism was earnest though not always successful. At his best, as in Main Street, he provided razor-sharp criticism of a nation greatly in need of self-caricature. He turned down a Pulitzer Prize and accepted a Nobel. He exasperated his two wives, explored radical politics without committing himself and was felled by alcoholism; Lewis's story in these respects shares much with that of other writers. Lingeman, a senior editor at the Nation, succeeds in capturing the giddy, forward progression of Lewis's life, full of obsessions and accidents; it's only at the end that one realizes that one has finished a tragedy. Although relatively few readers may set out to read a life of Sinclair Lewis, this well-crafted biography holds many rewards for those who find it. Agent, Virginia Barber. (On-sale: Jan. 15) Forecast: Thanks to the reputation Lingeman established with his acclaimed life of Dreiser, this will receive widespread review attention, which may draw more than the usual number of readers for a literary bio. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Having assayed a two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, Nation contributor Lingeman turns his attention to America's first Nobel prize winner. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews