"In 1930, Lewis worried about an “American fear of literature” — of
readers who didn’t want to grapple with social novels and the issues
they raised. Ninety years later, we should worry about why we stopped
fearing it."
The Philosophy of Creative Writing
IN 1930, Sinclair Lewis sailed to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in
Literature. In Stockholm, where he received the gold medal and a check
for $46,000 from King Gustaf V, Lewis thanked the Swedish Academy and
then devoted the next hour to condemning American literature and
criticism. Most Americans, he told his European audience, “are still
afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything
American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.”
He
railed against the jingoism and anti-intellectualism of American
universities and colleges, lamenting that they excluded creative writers
from their lecterns because professors liked their literature “cold and
pure and very dead.” Lewis saved his harshest words for new humanism, a
philosophical movement that promoted a restoration of moral teaching in
the liberal arts and opposed deterministic theories of human nature,
which he mocked as an “astonishing circus” and a “nebulous cult.”
Elitist, moralizing, nostalgic for an imagined past — new humanism, he
argued, epitomized the worst of American culture. Lewis, the first
American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, titled his lecture “The
American Fear of Literature.” He received a standing ovation in
Stockholm and severe criticism in the United States.
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City of American Literature
