The provocative masterpiece

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is notable for shattering the uniquely American myth of the open, progressive-minded small town. Its incisive attack on the provincial mentality stunned a nation proud of its new prosperity and power....

Possibly the best student of hypocrisy since Voltaire

This portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist-who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and self-indulgence-is also the chronicle of a reign of vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself....

Since the 1922 publication of Babbitt, its eponymous anti-hero-a real estate broker and relentless social climber inhabiting a Midwestern town called Zenith-has become a symbol of stultifying values and middle class hypocrisy....

This audiobook, read by Anthony Heald, is the Winner of the 2009 Audie® Award for Best Literary Fiction. Elmer Gantry is the portrait of a silver-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church, yet lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence. The title character starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel, Gantry encounters fellow religious hypocrites. Although often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited.When Elmer Gantry was published in 1927, it created a public furor. The book was banned in Boston and other cities, and there were threats of physical violence against the author....

Following the critical and commercial success of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis directed his barbs at the American businessman in Babbitt. The central character, George Follansbee Babbitt, is a middle-aged realtor living in Zenith, the Zip City. He is unimaginative, self-important, and hopelessly middle class. Vaguely dissatisfied with his position, he tries to alter the pattern of his life by flirting with liberalism and by having an affair with an attractive widow, only to find that his dread of ostracism is greater than his desire for escape. He does, however, encourage the rebellion of his son, Ted. Lewis's seventh novel defined an American type and gave the language a name for the smug person who readily conforms to middle class standards and conventions....

It is 1936. America has just elected Berzelius Windrip to the presidency-and his fascist policies turn the U.S. into a totalitarian state....

In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis’s prominence as a social commentator.

Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt’s secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over....

The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when America was largely oblivious to Hitler's aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a President who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, rampant promiscuity, crime, and a liberal press. Now finally back in print, It Can't Happen Here remains uniquely important, a shockingly prescient novel that's as fresh and contemporary as today's news....

Moving from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, college graduate Carol Milford tries to bring culture to the small town and is met by a wall of gossip, greed, pettiness, and bigotry. Reprint....