Sinclair Lewis: Dodsworth

Dodsworth (1929) is Sinclair Lewis’s most fully developed novel, a complex work which attempts to treat a less specific theme than his sharply targeted satires published earlier in the decade. While it employs some of Lewis’s characteristic satirical techniques, it is more ambitious than any of the author’s other four major novels of the 1920s. Its topic is one which is a frequent concern of Henry James, the difference between US and European manners, morals, and intellectual life, but it also has roots in American literature of the early nineteenth century, especially the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dodsworth’s career recalls that of Benjamin Franklin, as outlined in Franklin’s