Tice: Two Minnesota literary giants demonstrated what can’t happen here, and what can

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F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But the loving attention being paid far and wide this spring to the 100th anniversary of “The Great Gatsby” confirms that Minnesota’s favorite literary son was wrong — at least about the encores that can follow creative lives.

On the other hand, not every good book gets rediscovered. As it happens, a second Minnesota writer published a major novel in 1925, one more successful than “Gatsby” at the time. The author was Sinclair Lewis, and his largely forgotten bestseller a century ago, “Arrowsmith,” which grappled with issues still urgent a century later, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 1925, an honor Lewis theatrically and characteristically declined.

In 1930, it was Lewis, the caustic satirist from the windswept Minnesota prairie town of Sauk Centre, not Fitzgerald, the dreamy tragedian from the posh Summit Hill district in St. Paul, who became the first American ever awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Lewis accepted that one.)

Over the decades Lewis’ reputation has declined, while Fitzgerald’s rose to a “greatness” almost as mysterious as his iconic title character’s. Few of the ubiquitous lists of the best-novels-ever ever fail to place Fitzgerald’s moody Jazz Age masterpiece near the top. Meanwhile, even Lewis’ more famous titles — “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry” — which etched lasting metaphors into the American idiom, are routinely overlooked.

If these contrary posthumous fates are puzzling, so is the fact that two such influential authors arose, during what was arguably the golden decade of American letters, from the Minnesota hinterland — which both Lewis and Fitzgerald eagerly fled for more glamorous surroundings.

The cultural eminence of “The Great Gatsby” emerged only after it was given new life with a new generation through an armed services edition distributed to military personnel during World War II. Soon after it became an all-American pillar of the high school English curriculum, as it remains to this day.

The book’s boundless appeal is surprising in some ways.

The novel’s story is rather slight (though its brevity is likely one of its charms). It is the tale of a shady, enigmatic young millionaire hosting riotous Roaring ‘20s parties in his Long Island mansion while pining for a lost romance with a lovely but useless young woman enduring opulence and a philandering husband in a similar mansion across the bay. Gatsby’s quest to recapture his dream leads to ruin all around.

It is Fitzgerald’s hypnotic prose that lifts the melodrama to haunting heights, conjuring a lyrical mood of beautiful despair.

“The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life … . When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”

Fitzgerald’s unmysterious theme is a meditation on the elusiveness of the American dream, the emptiness of a society in perpetual pursuit of the unattainable, the hollowness of status and success, the “vast carelessness” of the rich. For Fitzgerald, who would chase the rainbow’s end from New York to Paris to Hollywood, where he died at just age 44, the quest always had much to do with an artistic Midwesterner’s ambition to make good in a more important place.

His novel’s narrator, Gatsby’s neighbor, heads east to work on Wall Street because the Midwest had come to seem not “the warm center of the world” but instead “the ragged edge of the universe.” Yet after Gatsby’s disaster he decides to go home, to …

“… my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but … the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark … in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common … .”

Sinclair Lewis also detected deficiencies in Middle Westerners — and in Americans generally, and in most members of the human race. He was a “red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds,” in the words of literary critic and columnist H.L. Mencken, a fellow scoffer.

Lewis had burst into prominence with the 1920 publication of “Main Street,” an ungenerous lampoon of complacent small-town life that was as hugely successful as it was utterly scandalous.

“Main Street is the climax of civilization,” the narrator sneered. It is …

“… dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

In books that are undeniably funny and perceptive, Lewis would go on to ridicule varied specimens within a cultural genus Mencken had dubbed boobus americanus. There was “Babbitt,” the buffoonish booster businessman. There was “Elmer Gantry,” the come-to-Jesus revival meeting con man peddling salvation and pitching woo (“Love is the morning and the evening star …” ). There was Sen. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, America’s doofus dictator in “It Can’t Happen Here,” published in 1935 as Hitler consolidated power in Germany.

Lewis had a special gift for what one courteous critic called “authentic descriptions of American speech rhythms,” while another marveled at his “grotesque facility” for reproducing “slang” — a “talent like playing the saw or cracking knuckles. … Lewis has some of the sharpest nails on the American blackboard.”

“Brother Males and Shemales: Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see … . On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!”

“Arrowsmith” was somewhat less of a harsh satire, more of a substantive social critique than many Lewis books. It also was less of a sensation, at least until it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and Lewis turned it down, denouncing America’s cultural establishment — the “inquisition of earnest literary ladies” — for insisting that writers be “safe, polite, obedient and sterile.”

Produced in collaboration with a science writer, “Arrowsmith” tells of an idealistic young doctor and bacteriologist searching for therapies to combat infection in the years before the great antibiotic discoveries.

Martin Arrowsmith longs to devote himself as a “lie-hunter” to pure laboratory research. But as a country doctor, public health officer, pharmaceutical researcher and more, his devotion to “the religion of a scientist” is corrupted time and again by relentless temptations of commercialism, social status, political agendas, even humanitarian concerns.

“Does truth matter — clean, cold, unfriendly truth … ? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it … . When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns, [his boss] merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign … .”

In the distrustful aftermath of COVID and its controversies over lab leaks and lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, misinformation and censorship, the scarcity of clean, cold truth in “Arrowsmith” feels as timeless as the fatal swagger of wealth in “Gatsby.”

Lewis and Fitzgerald were vanguard voices for a cultural discontent in modern America, a contempt for both careless riches and savorless conformity, that has today become a kind of orthodoxy.

But can a culture that produced enduring self-critical creations like theirs really have been as deficient as they charged?

D.J. Tice is a retired Minnesota Star Tribune commentary editor.