Sinclair Lewis in/on Nyc 

One hundred years ago today … Sinclair Lewis’s take on New York was the talk of New York. Marguerite Mooer Marshall devoted her column to an interview in which Lewis alternately blasts and praises the city. 

NEW YORK is cabaret crazy–New York is fine and calm and sane in its ideals; New York has no home life. New York is a city of homes; New York is money mad. New York is less interested in money than other American communities; New York is a human bedlam. New York is as quiet as the old home farm; New York is ugly and dirty- New York is rarely beautiful; New York is sophisticated and smooth of surface-New York is “rough-neck'; New York persecutes ita eccentric citizens; New York ignores them, or lionizes them; New York is and does all of these things at once, and that's why it is so eternally interesting, why almost everything said of it is true-yet why no one thing is the whole truth!"

In that paragraph of paradoxes Sinclair Lewis, author of "Main Street," the season's most successful American novel, convinced me that he knows his New York almost as well as his Gopher Prairie–and points east, south and west. Really, I wasn't surprised, for I happened to know that this "young Lochinvar coming out of the West" lived in and about New York for at least ten years and found here the slender, blue-eyed young woman who is Mrs. Lowis and who shared in our breakfast table talk about why New York isn't Main Street--thank the Lord!

(Marshall, Marguerite Mooer. “Sinclair Lewis Speaks Out! Dissects Our Dear New York.” Evening World, 2 April 1921, p. 13. )

Note: Marguerite Mooers Marshall was herself a novelist whose column has appeared on this site before) 

Mooer was correct: Lewis had arrived in NYC in 1910 and lived at 69 Charles Street (which was called Van Nest Street at the time). In his later years he would move back to the city and live in a penthouse apartment in the El Dorado at 90th Street and Central Park West.

At the time of Marshall’s column, Lewis was visiting NYC.

At a talk on March 29th, he argued that consuming newspaper articles had ruined New Yorkers’ ability to read novels, and promised to write a scathing novel about the city soon. 

Lewis proposed that American literature was entering a golden age. His roll call of great US writers included two New Yorkers we have reported on repeatedly: Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, plus Waldo Frank, James Branch Cabell, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Dorothy Canfield, Sherwood Anderson, Booth Tarkington, Floyd Dell, and Charles Norrie. All white writers.

Lewis spoke at Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, which had opened on January 12, 1921.

– Jonathan Goldman, April 2, 2021

TAGS: literature, novels, modernism, writers, theaters, venue, interview, journalism, lecture