Dodsworth [Paperback]

Sinclair Lewis (Author), Michael Meyer (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1995

Touring Europe with his beautiful but spoiled wife Fran, millionaire Sam Dodsworth, known as the American Captain of Industry, witnesses the clash of American and English cultures at the same time his marriage falls apart. Reissue.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Signet Classics (April 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451525981
• ISBN-13: 978-0451525987
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University in 1908. His college career was interrupted by various part-time occupations, including a period working at the Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's socialist experiment in New Jersey. He worked for some years as a free lance editor and journalist, during which time he published several minor novels. But with the publication of Main Street (1920), which sold half a million copies, he achieved wide recognition. This was followed by the two novels considered by many to be his finest, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis. In 1930, following Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for distinction in world literature. This was the apogee of his literary career, and in the period from Ann Vickers (1933) to the posthumously published World So Wide (1951) Lewis wrote ten novels that reveal the progressive decline of his creative powers. From Main Street to Stockholm, a collection of his letters, was published in 1952, and The Man from Main Street, a collection of essays, in 1953. During his last years Sinclair Lewis wandered extensively in Europe, and after his death in Rome in 1951 his ashes were returned to his birthplace.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Trophy Wife Dumps Hubby for Euro-Glitz", August 29, 2001

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dodsworth (Library Binding)

No doubt, this one is for your 'must read' list. When you put it down, you will feel you've lost contact with some great characters, that you've really got inside a marriage, that you've seen life the way it can be.

Samuel Dodsworth is an automobile magnate in the early years of the business. When his company is bought-out, he's left free at age 50, to do whatever he wants. But he has a slick, steel-willed, glamorous socialite for a wife and she has ambitions of climbing. He had always been "too busy to be discontented, and he managed to believe that Fran loved him.""(p.11) Sam gets roped into an extended European tour. Turns out, he's just an escort and backdrop for her movie. He experiences rising discomfort as she worms her way into European high society (or what she takes to be such). The trip gives both of them the first chance in decades to find out who they are---the common motif in literature and life of travelling to discover yourself---and they realize that they don't have much in common. Their European experiences transform them. On a visit back to the States, Dodsworth finds that he has changed; he can't regard his old friends, their old routines and concerns, and their ways with the same equanimity. They have become provincial and empty in his eyes, but what has he become ? He slowly comes to the conclusion that he's cut loose from all the went before, but has no direction for the future. He takes up several possibilities, but is caught among the rocks of loving the wayward Fran, wanting to do something useful in the world, and needing love himself. It's a long haul, but he makes it. Lewis skillfully keeps the psychological tension going to the very last page. Great stuff ! As for Fran, you'll have to read the book.

DODSWORTH is a psychological study of the first order, sincere, unpretentious and so well-written. It is not a satire on the lines of "Main Street", "Babbitt" or "Elmer Gantry", but a serious novel in the full sense of the word. Samuel Dodsworth comes across as a solid man of conservative nature who may have once been in a rut, but learns to think far more than people ever give him credit for, particularly his wife. He becomes flexible and learns to live, while Fran only continues to consume and demand. The plot plays itself out amidst a background of constant discussion as to what makes an American, what makes a European and what are the differences ? While this theme fascinated Henry James and numbers of other writers, it seems a bit passé in this day of the Web, 7 hour flights across 'the pond', massive tourism, MBAs in Europe and great museums in America. Still, it's part of the ambiance of the 1920s when this novel was written. The slow dissolution of the marriage, the contradictions of personality, the existence of strengths and weaknesses, aggressive and passive roles in both husband and wife, the psychological disintegration and re-building of a man's self-image-these are the main themes of DODSWORTH. It's one of the great American novels.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A delightful read, May 4, 2000

By 

Tom Bruce (East Moriches, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dodsworth (Paperback)

"Dodsworth" harkens to a day when you took time to read books, to savor words, descriptions, phrases, conversations between people. This is not a fast beach read, but a book to enjoy at a slow pace matching the flow of the text. Conversations go on for pages, with characters speaking in paragraphs, not sentences of 4 or 5 words. The book is an exploration of the mood and mind of Dodsworth, a retired American industrialist, still very much in the prime of his life, who is cajoled into taking his wife on an open-ended trip to Europe. The wife, battling the on-coming middle age years, flirts outrageously, and this leads to romantic entanglements. Dodsworth is left to fend for himself, and returns home, where he longs for his wayward spouse. Returning to Europe, he finds little changed and they agree to divorce. After fumbling around the contintent, Dodsworth finds a woman to love, but then his wife is dumped by her latest paramour and Dodsworh is faced with the choice of returning to his mate of 20 plus years, or setting out on a new course. You can feel his pain in coming to his decision. This book is a terrific discourse on the Ugly American as well as the phony European royalty. Both sides are equally distasteful, but interesting none-the-less. The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that Lewis seems to rush the ending. The resolution comes too quickly compared to the pace of the rest of the book. It's like the author thought, "Well, I've got almost 400 pages, so let's wrap it up." By the way, there is a very good movie made of the book featuring Walter Houston. It's available on video and very faithful to the book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Novel That Sings Like Middle American Opera, July 22, 2005

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dodsworth (Hardcover)

Sinclair Lewis's 1929 novel DODSWORTH has staying power. It remains widely read. It was made into a Broadway stage play and then a 1936 motion picture nominated for seven Academy Awards. Imagine Giancarlo Menotti or Leonard Bernstein turning DODSWORTH into an opera of Midwestern passion and rhetoric! Published the year before its author became America's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, DODSWORTH repeats and intensifies a number of themes, at least one visible as early as 1912's HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE.

--The hero, automobile pioneer Samuel Dodsworth, wonders whether there a dimension to corporate life beyond sheer hard work and sticking to what one knows best. If so what is it? Travel? Leisure? The life of the mind? Good conversation? An absorbing hobby? A wife supportive of both his business and non-business quests?

--Is travel in the sense of sheer moving from here to there, from one place to another, out roughing it on the long trail, the ultimate solution? Must man move incessantly in order to be happy? In New York City, after some months in a more relaxed, contemplative Europe, Dodsworth saw Manhattan as "veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed." That God of Speed "demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for. A demanding God, this Speed, ... who once he had been offered a hundred miles an hour, straightway demanded a hundred and fifty" (Ch. 16).

--Midwestern Americans, makers of national greatness, at their best are regularly accused by Sinclair Lewis of being ordinary, conformist, risk avoiders. Without their Babbitry, their service clubs, their lodges and their main-line churches, American business leaders of the second magnitude are nothing, certainly not the legendary American pioneers of yesteryear! In some ways, Sam Dodsworth at 50 was therefore not a typical product of midwestern Zenith. He was "perfectly, the American Captain of Industry. ... (But) He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. ... He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business" (Ch.2). When Dodsworth opted for a few months of travel abroad before jumping back into the rat race, the man who bought out his company accused him of thinking that the purpose of life is loafing, whereas, "I tell you, Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion. ... Do big things" (Ch. 3). In London, even his wife Fran accused Dodworth (who had attended only one Rotary lunch in his life) of wanting to be "back in all the Rotarian joys of Zenith" (Ch. 11). Ross Ireland, a world traveler journalist told Dodsworth that one reason he loved America so passionately was that its "Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic Federation are (not) any more grab-it-all than the English merchant" (Ch. 16). In discussing America's appeal to him with emerging lady friend Edith Cortwright, Sam Dodsworth ironically concluded that there are only two good reasons for American businessmen to travel abroad: to attend "a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he's well insulated from furriners. Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge!" (Ch. 31)

--Another recurring Sinclair Lewis riddle is the relation of husband to wife. Does a great American achiever really need a wife? If so, why? She dare not be his intellectual or entrepreneurial equal. She is permitted a few innocent distractions from running a household and raising children. Dancing and country clubbing are all right. Flirting with other men is frowned upon. And Dodsworth has absolutely no empathy for wife Fran as she frenetically reasserts her youth and her right not to be known as a grandmother. Above all, she has no right to carp at him, to put him in his place before his friends or hers.

DODSWORTH was written by Sinclair Lewis at the height of his powers. If Samuel Dodsworth is a brooding Prince Hamlet among American business leaders, he is a distinctly understated American Hamlet. Yes, Sam Dodsworth is more Socratic than a Babbitt or a Rotarian but less human than the troubled, seeking sinners of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

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