The End of Sinclair Lewis

Grace Hegger Lewis had the good—and also, as it turned out, the bad—luck to be married to Sinclair Lewis from 1915 to 1928, the period which witnessed the publication of the Nobel Prize winner’s best work. Her memoir of those years, With Love From Gracie (Harcourt, Brace, $5.75), has its moments of excruciatingly bad taste: there are things in it which, though they would be undeniably useful to a Boswell, should never have been committed to paper by a wife, or even by an ex-wife.

In spite of its moments of sloppy self-justification, however, the memoir has all the fascination of a Lewis novel. Mrs. Lewis is filled with the same sort of electrical ambivalence, the same love-hate oscillation, that gave such a vibrant quality to Main Street and Babbitt. Out of her own unresolved tensions, her anguished puzzlement over her subject, she generates verve.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Grace Hegger Lewis had the good—and also, as it turned out, the bad—luck to be married to Sinclair Lewis from 1915 to 1928, the period which witnessed the publication of the Nobel Prize winner’s best work. Her memoir of those years, With Love From Gracie (Harcourt, Brace, $5.75), has its moments of excruciatingly bad taste: there are things in it which, though they would be undeniably useful to a Boswell, should never have been committed to paper by a wife, or even by an ex-wife.

In spite of its moments of sloppy self-justification, however, the memoir has all the fascination of a Lewis novel. Mrs. Lewis is filled with the same sort of electrical ambivalence, the same love-hate oscillation, that gave such a vibrant quality to Main Street and Babbitt. Out of her own unresolved tensions, her anguished puzzlement over her subject, she generates verve.