Course:Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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Sinclair Lewis was an American author (1885-1951), known for his satirization of American middle-class life. (He is also the namesake of my dearly departed tuxedo cat.) I first came across Lewis’s work in high school, where American schools often teach his novels Main Street (1920) or Babbitt (1922). It wasn’t until I had graduated college and was working a relentless office job in New York that I picked up his novel Arrowsmith (1925), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. I was amazed at how it spoke so directly to my experience— of being young, idealistic, ambitious, and feeling caught in the cogs of capitalism— 80 years later. For me, this translates to a writing mindset, where I search for what is timeless and universal, even in the most specific line, poem, or story. What does an individual desire or frustration have in common with what others feel and experience?
Lewis is known for his mastery of satire, accomplished alongside realism. It’s an approach that reminds me of Russian literature greats like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. His characters are full and we are bound up in their desires and goals, and yet, we also see the patterns and systems that hem them in. Lewis portrays these patterns and systems with satirical humor, while allowing his characters to be earnestly caught up in them. I find myself especially drawing on this approach when I write poems of frustration, whether the source of that frustration is political or relationship-based. As a counter to my own embroiled feelings and the personal specificity of the subject, using satire implicates a wider audience and application. Sometimes, it even allows me to turn my lens back on myself, and implicate myself as someone who also inhabits problematic patterns and systems. It’s also a way to bring humor into painful subjects. By writing satirically about the anti-trans protestors’s relationship with Victoria Secret in my poem “Protestors,” I was able to instill the situation with enough amusement that I could get through the writing, and perhaps, successfully poke at the societal systems of cishetero conditioning.