What Ever Happened to Sinclair Lewis?

Reflecting upon Mark Schorer's not insignificant part in burying Sinclair Lewis' reputation Lewis' biographer Richard Lingeman writes that Schorer's work "was a product of its time," which was "the silent 1950s, the era of the anticommunist culture war in academe, the heyday of the New Critics, who placed text above social context."

It strikes me that Lingeman is entirely correct about Schorer's literary ideas and his application of them. It also strikes me, as it does not strike Lingeman, that in this as in many other ways we never really moved past that time--the damage to reputations like that of Lewis enduring, with the same going for the damage done to our ideas about art. Back in the early twentieth century figures like H.G. Wells or Upton Sinclair criticized the received ideas about the valuation of artistic work, not least the "great lies" that form comes ahead of content, and "politics" has no place in art. In their counter-attack against all that Schorer and company upheld the lies, so that they stand virtually unchallenged in our time, to our cost.