Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith

About Arrowsmith

Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (1925) is the most earnest of his 1920s satires — Martin Arrowsmith the idealistic doctor navigating the corrupt institutions of American medicine and science. Written with the bacteriologist Paul de Kruif, it won the Pulitzer Prize that Lewis declined, the most famous rejection in the history of the prize. Arrowsmith is the Lewis novel most widely taught in medical schools and the one most interested in the relationship between idealism and institutional life rather than the pure satirical portrait of Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. Lewis accepted the Nobel Prize in 1930, in part on the strength of Arrowsmith.