Sinclair Lewis Archive

A Return to Main Street

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Sinclair Lewis’s novel offers no solutions to current social ills, nor does fiction serve such ends well. Fiction may, on the other hand, meditate on the romantic and the realistic to reveal insight into individual minds seeking out the world to find the best way to live in it.

Main Street

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Main Street holds an unusual place in my bookish heart: it is one of those novels that I love, but rarely recommend. It is dull. But listen—its dullness is part of its charm.

Upton Sinclair, the spirit of Sophocles, and me: a Visit to Lily Dale

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  In 1922, writer and spiritualism convert Upton Sinclair wrote, “You may go to Lily Dale … and in row after row of tents, you may hear and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may