Free The Last Empire by Gore Vidal

very funny about what must have been a fairly uncomfortable visit. “One morning when ‘the curse’ was upon me,” Grace asked for breakfast on a tray. The Lewises said no, while Hal, Grace’s name for her husband, was “furious. He had always taken for granted his affection for his parents and their behavior he had never questioned. But seeing his family through the eyes of New York and of marriage he was appalled by his father’s overbearing rudeness.” Grace suggests that this visit forced Lewis to see his hometown in an entirely new way and shift the point of view from that of a lonely offbeat lawyer in what was to be called
The Village Virus
, to that of Carol, a girl from outside the village who marries the local doctor, Will Kennicott, and so observes
the scene with big city (in her case Minneapolis) eyes.
    Grace reports that Dr. Lewis did apologize; the young couple stayed on; and the town magnates were brought to their knees when they learned just how much Lewis had been paid for a two-part serial in the
Woman’s Home Companion
($1,500). “When he told them that it had taken him two weeks to write the serial, the banker, dividing so much per diem, was visibly awed. . . . The young Lewises were to find that this measuring of talent by dollars was fairly universal, and Hal was hurt at first by the lack of interest in the writing itself.”
    Their later life in Washington sounds agreeable. She tells us how they would walk to the Chevy Chase Club with the young Dean Achesons and how Lewis also frequented the Cosmos Club and got to know General Billy Mitchell, Clarence Darrow, and the scarlet lady of our town, Elinor Wylie—murmur her name, as indeed people were still doing a few years later when I was growing up. The Lewises seem not to have known the Achesons’ friend Grace Zaring Stone, author of
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, who, when told by a lady novelist that she was writing a novel about Evil, sighed, “If only I had thought of that!”
    Lewis maintained that the idea for a novel whose subject would be a small Midwestern market town came to him in 1905. I should suspect that it was always there. Village life was the first thing that he had known and, sooner or later, writers usually deal with their origins. The real-life lawyer Charles T. Dorion was to be the main character, an idealistic soul, able to see through the pretences, the hypocrisies, the . . . the . . . the absolute boredom of Sauk Centre (renamed by Lewis Gopher Prairie). But the 1916 homecoming gave Lewis a new point of view, that of his elegant New York wife, to be called Carol. Dorion was demoted to supporting cast, as Guy Pollock.
    In July 1920, in a Washington heat wave, Sinclair Lewis finished
Main Street
. He gave the book to his friend Alfred Harcourt, who had started a new publishing house to be known, in time, as Harcourt, Brace, in which Lewis had invested some of his own money. In the business of authorship he seldom put a foot wrong.
    October 23, 1920,
Main Street
was published and, as one critic put it, “if
Main Street
lives, it will probably be not as a novel but as an incident in American life.” Even Schorer, not yet halfway through Lewis’s career, concedes, a bit sadly, that the book was “the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history.” As of 1922 an estimated two million Americans had read the book; and they went right on reading it for years. With Howells gone, Lewis took his place as numero uno and reigned both at home and abroad until 1930, after which, according to Schorer, “with the increasing conformity at the surface of American life and the increasing fragmentation at its base, there have been no contenders at all.” I’m not sure that Bill or Ernest or Scott or Saul or Norman or . . . would agree. The contenders are all in place. The problem is that fiction—stories intended to be read by almost everyone—ceased to be of much interest
to a public “with no