Recommendations
Books Like Dodsworth
Best books to read after Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth is his most sympathetic novel — Sam Dodsworth in Europe watching his marriage to Fran dissolve, growing beyond the Zenith businessman he was. These recommendations share its portrait of the American abroad, its engagement with Lewis's satirical project, or its place in the American-in-Europe literary tradition.
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Buy on AmazonBabbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
The satirical counterpart — George Babbitt the Zenith businessman who can't escape his conformism, the same milieu that Sam Dodsworth transcends in Dodsworth.
- 2
Buy on AmazonMain Street
by Sinclair Lewis
The companion Lewis — Carol Kennicott and Sam Dodsworth are Lewis's two most sympathetically drawn protagonists seeking self-determination against provincial expectations.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Americans in Europe at the same moment — Jake Barnes and the expatriates, the other great novel of the American abroad in the late 1920s, in a different key than Dodsworth.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer in Europe — the great American in Europe novel that preceded Dodsworth, Lewis explicitly working in the James tradition of the New World sensibility encountering Old World complexity.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Ambassadors
by Henry James
Lambert Strether in Paris discovering that Europe has its own values — another James novel of the American abroad, the direct predecessor to Dodsworth's emotional journey.
- 6
Buy on AmazonA Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
The other 1920s American in Europe — Frederic Henry in Italy, love and war and loss, the tragic counterpoint to Dodsworth's more measured account of an American marriage's dissolution.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anthony and Gloria Patch watching their marriage dissolve through dissolution — Fitzgerald's portrait of a marriage destroyed by fantasy and expectation, the jazz age parallel to Fran and Sam Dodsworth.
- 8
Buy on AmazonDeath in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Aschenbach's European dissolution — the German-language counterpart to Dodsworth's American dissolution in Europe, the artist undone by the Old World's beauty in the same cultural moment.
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