Sinclair Lewis’ Yellowstone frontier
America’s first big writer in America’s national park
My first reaction was the same as most people’s: Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel set in Yellowstone National Park??? Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? The author of Main Street, Babbitt, and It Can’t Happen Here? In the nation’s signature national park? Why isn’t this more widely known?
Lewis’ 1920s novels satirized the narrow-minded conformity of American small towns, especially in the Midwest and West—I’ve always thought of them as marking the end of the frontier. Many historians put the end of the frontier at the 1890 census, or maybe at the 1893 interpretation of that census by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. But on the ground, not much changed. For example, railroads, including transcontinental lines, continued to be built. Native American populations continued to decline until 1900, when they stabilized (and grew after 1930). Automobiles and their roads didn’t explode until the 1910s.
Most importantly, the national identity continued to center on dreams of using free land to pull yourself up by your bootstraps amid a glorious small-town community. Indeed, more acres were homesteaded after 1890 than before. And even though plenty of people were living in cities and working in factories, there was a sense that the True Americans lived in or near heartland small towns.
Then Lewis—with contemporaries such as H.L. Mencken—blew those myths apart. Lewis had grown up in what he felt was a stultifying small town in Minnesota. He escaped to Yale and traveled widely as an adult. He much preferred the sophistication of urban life. But he knew those small-town folk well enough to depict their foibles in fiction. Today, following Lewis, America tends to see small heartland towns as podunk places lacking in decent coffee or vegetarian food. Flyover country.
So what did Lewis think of Yellowstone? He and his wife Grace drove through in 1916. He published some travelogue-style articles about his trip in the Saturday Evening Post, but they didn’t focus much on the national park—maybe because he was already planning to save those experiences for a book.
In this month’s Big Sky Journal, I write about that book. In many ways, the novel is a lightweight romcom. It too began as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. So Lewis may have been writing what his editors thought audiences wanted: a positive upbeat portrayal of likeable characters thriving amid melodramatic threats.
By contrast, Main Street was a standalone novel. Lewis didn’t serialize it first. He sprang it on the nation in full on October 23, 1920. Its message made it a runaway bestseller. But many people found it bleak and depressing: the feminist heroine is beaten down by her dull husband and jealous, vapid neighbors. Her victory, if it’s a victory, is to endure.
Main Street made Lewis rich, meaning that he longer had to depend on serializing his stories. It also made him feel empowered. In his lecture upon receiving the Nobel Prize, he said, “In America most of us – not readers alone but even writers – are still afraid of literature which is not a glorification of everything American.” Ideas of the frontier had embodied that glorification.
Yellowstone is infested with ideas of the frontier. Yet, as I wrote in Wonderlandscape, it has a remarkably American capacity for reinvention. Lewis in 1916 happened to catch it amid one of its biggest reinventions, into an automobile-based experience. He knew how much his editors and readers hungered for that story.
End notes:
I enjoyed writing the Big Sky Journal piece and am grateful to editor Jessianne Castle for commissioning it. As usual, you can read all the words at the website but the print version has better layout.
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A subscriber asked my thoughts about President Trump this week nominating a hospitality executive to head the National Park Service. I felt like I said it all here last June.
Who said It Can't Happen Here?
After reading this and the “Bebe Rebozo” story, I’m beginning to think that deep down, you really are a conservative ( in the truest sense of the word) at heart!