Recommendations
Books Like Arrowsmith
Best books to read after Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith is his most earnest novel — Martin Arrowsmith the idealistic doctor navigating the corrupt institutions of American medicine. These recommendations share its portrait of the idealist in conflict with institutions, its medical fiction themes, or its place in Lewis's decade of American social satire.
- 1Buy
Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
The companion satire — George Babbitt in real estate, the same Lewis decade showing the conformist from the inside rather than the idealist's perspective.
- 2Buy
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis
The Lewis debut — Carol Kennicott in small-town Minnesota, the provincial satire that precedes Arrowsmith and shows the institutions that Martin Arrowsmith escapes.
- 3Buy
The Citadel
by A.J. Cronin
The British Arrowsmith — Andrew Manson the idealistic doctor in the Welsh mining valleys and then London, the most direct heir to Lewis's medical novel in the British tradition.
- 4Buy
Of Human Bondage
by W. Somerset Maugham
Philip Carey studying medicine in London — the most sustained portrait of medical training in British fiction, the personal-bildungsroman counterpart to Arrowsmith's institutional satire.
- 5Buy
Microbe Hunters
by Paul de Kruif
The non-fiction companion — Lewis's collaborator on Arrowsmith wrote this 1926 account of the great bacteriologists, the book that provided much of the scientific idealism Arrowsmith dramatizes.
- 6Buy
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Published the same year as Lewis's Nobel — Hemingway and Lewis were antagonists in the literary culture of the late 1920s, and A Farewell to Arms represents the other approach to the same American idealism Arrowsmith embodies.
- 7Buy
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
The Russian doctor-idealist navigating revolution — a more tragic version of Arrowsmith's dilemma, the physician trying to maintain integrity and vocation against historical catastrophe.
- 8Buy
Being Mortal
by Atul Gawande
The contemporary non-fiction reckoning with medicine's relationship to dying — the heir to Arrowsmith's portrait of idealism against institutional pressure in the specific domain of end-of-life care.
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