Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, published in 1924 and now hopelessly dated, was a mere thirty years old when we read it in Erasmus Hall High School English classes. I must confess, once again, that I recall almost nothing from my 1950s reading — just a vague sense that I'd been there before. Nevertheless, the novel wasn't a bad book to present to young people. Dr. Martin Arrowsmith is a dedicated, humorless, idealistic, workaholic scientist who eludes both the snares of commerce and also of love and family in a single-minded pursuit of the knowledge that will save lives. Sinclair Lewis's America is repressive, vulgar, materialistic, and unredeemed. Why not let high schoolers read a book with such a manic, satirical spirit? It might have done them a world of good — though I can't vouch that it did anything for me.
Dr. Arrowsmith has no time anything so frivolous as aesthetics — and it's just as well, for neither does his creator. Arrowsmith is shapeless in form and crude in style. It's a sledgehammer of a book, as unsubtle as America at its worst.
Query: were we informed that Sinclair Lewis was famous for having said that "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross?"
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