Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

A writer who did the work

This photo is inscribed by Lewis “amiably” to Chicago Sun literary critic C. N. Thomas, and dated Chicago, October 10, 1922. Credit: Emil Otto Hoppe, 1922

When you enter the Minnesota History Center’s new exhibit about author Sinclair Lewis, you are meant to turn to the right, and if you do, you will find photos of his parents, his boyhood home and Lewis himself as a child — the sorts of things you expect at the beginning of a story. From there, you should proceed on a path providing a roughly chronological trip through adolescence, his years at Yale and his rise as a writer.

I didn’t go that route.

When I arrived, I glanced to the left and saw the books — dozens upon dozens of them arranged on a long swath of wall space. Lewis wrote 24 novels, the first published under a pen name in 1912 and the last released in 1951, soon after his death. The exhibit includes the famous and obscure among his books in 1920 first edition of "Main Street"

Many of Lewis’s works were translated for foreign readers, including this 1948 Danish language version of "Kingsblood Royal." Credit: Courtesy University of Minnesota Libraries first editions, later hardcover editions, foreign editions and paperbacks in all shapes and sizes, including three novels that were printed as Armed Services Editions, pocket-size for American soldiers in World War II.

It’s an amazing sight, that wall, and it represents an astonishing amount of effort. As I stood in front of all those books, I thought about all the work involved — the creative energy and the physical demands of banging out so many words on a manual typewriter, a task Lewis apparently handled with a two-fingered, rapid-fire typing style. I found myself thinking back to something I happened upon and read 20 years ago — the eulogy given by Frederick Manfred at Lewis’ funeral, which was on a subzero day in January 1951 in Sauk Centre, where Red Lewis, as friends knew him, had grown up.

Several bits and pieces of Manfred’s depiction of Lewis had stuck with me through two decades — in part because Manfred was unusually frank about some shortcomings of the deceased man, describing him as a “struggle writer” and explaining how loneliness shaped his life and work.

“Writing came hard for Red Lewis. He had to wrestle with it, and out of the wrestling came discipline and the need to work for the rest of his life,” said Manfred, a Minnesota novelist from a subsequent generation whose books had a style quite different from the biting satire that helped make Lewis famous.

While explaining that his art did not come naturally to Lewis, Manfred told the gathered mourners that Lewis’ first six novels were “neither distinguished nor successful.” (Six books amounts to a lifetime output for many successful authors, of course.) Lewis’ seventh book was “Main Street,” which, Manfred said, “became world famous and which helped change the whole course of modern American literature, perhaps even world literature.”

The History Center’s exhibit, called “Sinclair Lewis: 100 Years of Main Street,” marks a milestone since Lewis

released his breakthrough book, which tells the story of a woman aspiring for better things for her town and herself who is thwarted by the complacency and narrowmindedness of her neighbors. Lewis spent time in Mankato working on “Main Street,” living at 315 S. Broad St. in the summer of 1919.

Lewis would reach his greatest heights in the 1920s, publishing six more novels before the decade’s end.

The exhibit has a mission beyond marking a milestone, though. It makes the case that Lewis’ work remains relevant after so much time. With a style that was accessible and readable, he took on issues that do not sound like dusty history. His 1925 novel “Arrowsmith,” for example, tells the story of a doctor who finds himself in a struggle between science and compassion while fighting an epidemic that kills his wife and many others around him. “Babbitt,” released in 1922, pokes fun at the conformity and hollowness of middle-class life, and “Elmer Gantry,” from 1927, presents a charismatic preacher with secret vices and dubious motives.

In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (his medal is part of the exhibit), and he continued publishing novels through the 1930s and 1940s, including 1935’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” which tells of the rise of an American dictator and which returned to the bestseller list early in the Trump era.

Among Minnesota writers, no one compares to Lewis in terms of the number of important novels he produced, the accolades and praise he won, and the commercial success he enjoyed. But even at his own funeral, Lewis was compared unfavorably to contemporaries including fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is now widely considered a writer of greater import and skill. In his eulogy, Manfred acknowledged Lewis “was not a natural and fluent writer as, say, Scott Fitzgerald was.”

But, true to his thesis, Manfred reminded mourners of Lewis’ commitment to finishing his work and to making himself a great writer. Manfred said, “Writing came easy for Scott Fitzgerald and, one can argue, because of it Scott did not learn discipline.”