The really popular novels, it used to be, were those that strengthened the socialization of readers to an ideal image they held. How much, do you think, that is still so, though the ideal may have changed? Listen to Sinclair Lewis in his 12 December 1930 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature:
To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias.
For a brief biography of Sinclair Lewis, click here. For images of and relating to Sinclair Lewis, click here. For his Nobel Prize speech, click here.
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