Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America [Paperback]

Sinclair Lewis (Author), Sally E. Parry (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

A brand-new collection of Sinclair Lewis's prolific body of short fiction, focusing on the author's primary concerns: the issue of class, work and money in America.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Signet Classics (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451529677
• ISBN-13: 978-0451529671
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #863,730 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

4.0 out of 5 stars An overlooked gem, August 4, 2011

By 

D. Henderson (Las Cruces, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (Paperback)

I suppose SInclair Lewis is mostly known these days for a handful of novels - Elmer Gantry, Babbitt, Main Street, It Can't Happen Here, and Arrowsmith. I've only read the first two, and intend to read the others, but I was leaving on a trip where I wasn't sure how much time I was going to have to read, so I packed 'Go East, Young Man' rather than taking a novel.
I hadn't known beforehand that Lewis even wrote short stories. But I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Lewis fashions several of these stories around adages, or age-old dilemmas, such as 'watch out what you wish for', 'crime doesn't pay', 'the grass is always greener', materialism, struggles between conflicting goals/wants in a marriage, alcoholism, and more. Another thing that is present in a few of these stories is a very funny, but very dry, sense of humor, which I don't think you'll see nearly as often in his novels, although it's been a while since I read a couple of those.
If you like Sinclair Lewis, and/or maybe if you simply like good short stories, and if the flavor of America in the teens, 20's and 30's doesn't bore you (and as I said above, a lot of the subject matter is timeless), check out this book.