The
Rise of Sinclair Lewis examines the making of Lewis' s best-selling
novels Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer
Gantry—their sources, composition, publication, and subsequent
critical reception. Drawing on thousands of pages of material from
Lewis’s notes, outlines, and drafts—most of it never before
published—James M. Hutchisson shows how Lewis selected usable
materials and shaped them, through his unique vision, into novels
that reached and remained part of the American literary imagination.
Hutchisson also describes for the first time how large a role was
played by Lewis's wives, assistants, and publishers in determining
the final shape of his books.
James
M. Hutchisson is Associate Professor of English at The Citadel.
