Sinclair-Lewis(-辛克莱·刘易斯)

美国有许多名山大川，有无尽的草原，建造了许多庞 大的城市，同时也丢掉许多边远的茅屋村舍，丢掉了 亿万财富，也丢掉了许多信念，美国像俄国一样陌生 新奇、像中国一样错综复杂，这些年轻的美国作家们， 决心给美国带来与美国的伟大浩瀚相称的文学，我很 高兴我个人与他们的决心相去还不甚远。我就是怀着 这样的喜悦，向他们表示我的敬意的。
It meant cheap shops, ugly public buildings, and citizens who were bound by rigid conventions.
The book had parallels with the author's own early life. The protagonist also has skin problems. Lewis claimed that Main Street was read "with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth."
Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951)
In 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his lifetime he published 22 novels.
Born in the town of Sank Center, Minnesota; Graduated from Yale; Became an editor and a writer; Published Main Street in 1920 and won the Nobel Prize in literature; Published Babbitt in 1922.is criticized at times the American way of living, but his basic view was optimistic.
His central characters are the pioneer, the doctor, the scientist, the businessman, and the feminist. The appeal of his best fiction lies in the opposition between his idealistic protagonists and an array of fools, charlatans(假装内行的骗子）, and scoundrels - evangelists, editorialists, pseudo-artists, cultists, and boosters.
Babbitt
In such a perfectly standardized money society, money and richness are most important, to which beauty, passion, wisdom, joy, and sanctity give place. A person's social status is measured by the sum of money he owns and his possessions. Being wealthy, he will have high social and be admired and respected by others are so eager to have with him.
Babbitt
Consequently, everyone is ruled by the desire to get rich. Booming business is regarded as the best way to reach this aim. Stimulated by this motive, businessmen accumulated wealth by incontestable means as bribe, cheat, threat, conspiracy, completely discarding business morals.
Babbitt (1922)
The prevalence of commercialism and pragmatism inevitably bring about material showiness. The citizens like Babbitt are wild about mechanical devices and convenient facility for showing one's own possessions as the main way to prove his social status. Therefore, the citizens of Zenith not only their rack their brains to accumulate wealth or social prestige but also take pains to show wealth in order to gain and keep the respect of others for material showiness is the proof of your being respected or not by others.
美国有许多名山大川，有无尽的草原，建造了许多庞大的城市，同时也丢掉许多边远 的茅屋村舍，丢掉了亿万财富，也丢掉了许多信念，美国像俄国一样陌生新奇、像中 国一样错综复杂，这些年轻的美国作家们，决心给美国带来与美国的伟大浩瀚相称的 文学，我很高兴我个人与他们的决心相去还不甚远。我就是怀着这样的喜悦，向他们 表示我的敬意的。
Babbitt -a Miniature of the American Middle Class in the 1920s
The decade of the 1920s is often characterized as a period of American prosperity and optimism. It is the decade of the speakeasies, movie, and flappers. The Roaring Twenties, from the end of WWI to the stock market crash in 1929, did usher in an era of great social change, general prosperity, and what historians refer to as “modernity“(现代派). However, in Lewis's Babbitt, the decade of the 1920s is described as shallow, corrupt, and materialistic period in American history.
Main Street
Main Street was a study of idealism and reality in a narrow-minded small-town.
"Main Street is the continuation of main Streets everywhere."
还有桑顿·怀尔德，处在现实主义时代的他，却缅怀 梦想着不朽的浪漫主义往昔的良辰美景，还有约 翰·多斯·帕索斯，他憎恶巴比特那四平八稳的标准 观，及其他那堂而皇之的所谓革命；还有斯蒂芬·贝 尼特，他用自己那对老约翰·布朗的光彩夺目的回忆， 给单调乏味的美国文坛恢复了叙事诗的生气，还有迈 克尔·戈尔德和威廉·福克纳，前一位揭示了犹太东 区文学的新疆界；后一位将南方各州的文学从女人的 裙子那儿解脱出来；还有许多其它年轻的诗人和小说 家，他们现在大多住在巴黎，大多数对詹姆斯·乔伊 斯的传统表现出某种狂热。然而，无论多么狂热，他 们都已拒绝装腔作势摆架子，拒绝墨守陈规，拒绝迟 钝呆滞的文风。
对美国文学的未来，我充满了希望，也满怀着各种热切的信念。
我认为，我们正在从四平八稳、迟钝沉闷的地方主义的束缚中 挣脱出来。现在有许多年轻的美国人，正满腔热情，稳健可靠 地工作着，以致使我因年迈不能与他们为伍而感到有点淡淡的 哀愁。其中有欧内斯特·海明威，一位严格、有拚命工作精神 的年轻人，受过严酷经历的熏陶，用高标准严格锻炼自己，是 一位真正的艺术家，一直投身于现实生活的浪潮之中；还有托 马斯·沃尔夫，是位30岁或者不到30岁的小伙子。他的惟一一 部长篇小说《天使，望故乡》，堪与我们文学创作中最优秀的 作品相媲美，是一部散发着浓郁生活气息的巨著.
Babbitt
Babbitt is set in the modern Midwestern city of Zenith, it is not like older cities whose buildings are citadels devoted to war or cathedrals devoted to religion, Zenith's shining towers are devoted to business, devoted to the new. It is a miniature of the twentieth-century America. In Babbitt, Lewis shows the reader a city prevailed upon with commercialism and pragmatism, which is the epitome of the whole-country-America.
Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) The Trial of the Hawk (1915) Main Street (1920) Babbitt (1922) Arrowsmith (1925) The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
Sinclair Lewis’ Nobel Prize Address
(After praising Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and other contemporary American writers:)
I solute them, with a joy in being not yet too far removed from the determination to give to the America that has mountains and endless prairies, enormous cities and lost farm cabins, billions of money and tons of faith, to an America that is as strange as Russia and as complex as china, a literature worthy of her vastness.
Photographs of “Main Street”
Illustrations of the photographs
When Sinclair Lewis wrote “Main Street”, it was generally believed that his home town, Sauk Center, Minnesota, was the locale although he called his fictional town Gopher Prairie. Though the heroine of “Main Street” Lewis expressed his own feelings, particularly his dissatisfactions.