Excerpt from The McGilliad, Vol. 2: December 1930

For some weeks rumours have been current that this year it was at last the turn of America to receive the prize for literature, America's best luck previously having been with the prize for peace. It is known that the claims of various American writers were being deftly put before the members of the Swedish Academy. It is said that a group of lobbyists was especially active in the interest of Mr. Paul More, the Humanist. Then rumour had it that the competition had settled down to Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. At last, the choice of Lewis was announced to the public.

One thing, at any rate, can be said in justification of the selection of Sinclair Lewis. He is not an unknown man. On the contrary, he is one of the most widely read of living writers. As Walter Lippman pointed out some years ago, he seems to have begun with writing novels to please the public that nobody wanted to read, and to have shifted to writing novels to please himself that everybody wanted to read. The publication of Main Street in 1920 made his name a familiar one throughout the United States. Two years later, the success of Babbitt brought him a large English public and since then he has become one of the three or four best known American writers on the continent of Europe. Mr. Lewis is undoubtedly a man to be reckoned with.

The Nation a few weeks ago ventured to pro phesy that Arrowsmith would be read when Lewis's other books are read no longer. One may class this with that other famous prophecy that a certain epic poem would be read when the Iliad and Odyssey were forgotten. It seems a safer guess that Lewis will continue to be known as the author of Main Street and Babbitt. Those two titles have become part of the ordinary vocabulary. Anybody can talk of Main Street and Babbitt not as titles of books, but as names having a very definite connotation.

Main Street in Gopher Prairie has come to typify the small town with its alleged sordid life and total lack of aesthetic and intellectual interests. This, of course, is a reaction from the former conception of the village as a place of idyllic charm and quiet. Babbitt is a type of complacent business man, ah sorbed in the material and mechanical side of living. With no idealistic outlook or aspirations. In the books we see Gopher Prairie through the eyes of Carol Kennicott, who hated it just as Jim Hawkins hated the island before he landed on it. We see Babbitt as he appears to an unfriendly observer who can take in from his point of view only certain superficial aspects.

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