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Bernard Shaw in Sinclair Lewis

Running into Sinclair Lewis in Canterbury in 1921, writer Mary Austin took the recently famous author of Main Street, his wife, and a friend to nearby Herne Bay, where they chatted with Bernard Shaw for several hours. Afterward, Lewis his nose, forehead, and lankiness Shavian bought a fiery wig and whiskers and gleefully mimicked the preachy playwright.1 As a collegiate drama critic, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) had been delighted but bewildered by Candida (1898); later, in New Haven in 1905, the Yale undergraduate had taken in the first performance of Mrs Warren's Profession. By this time, also the year of H. L. Mencken's laudatory little handbook, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, Lewis had developed Shavianitis. In the clash between old actions of conduct and new ones, the campus rebel found Shaw's witty iconoclasm irresistible. Like Shaw, Lewis became an ingenious social satirist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Both the playwright and the novelist have been likened to Aristophanes and Swift. Lewis's more than two-score novels (and more than a hundred popular stories) mimic the speech and action of the American middle class, turning what seems photographic realism into good-humored caricature. Having read the Fabians Wells and Shaw, Lewis the young middle-class journalist and freelance writer was in 1911-12 a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party of New York. Like Shaw, Lewis would come to a final defense of capitalism, but his early novels expose readers to the possibilities of a beneficial world socialism. His flexible, highly readable prose (provoking laughter primarily through exuberant exaggeration) flings itself at American versions of sham, complacency, and hypocrisy in small towns, business, medicine, religion, marriage, welfare, philanthropy, and race relations. And like Bernard Shaw, the author of such major novels of the 1920s as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth has been accused of overstressing his ideas and effects at the expense of aesthetic proportion and coherence. Lashing out at corruption, brutality, obscurity,