Sinclair Lewis Books in Order

A schoolboy nicknamed Hike gets pulled into an early aviation adventure that stretches from academy life to the Mexican border. It mixes football, horses, and a homemade aircraft in a brisk juvenile tale.

Shy clerk Bill Wrenn leaves his novelty company routine after a small inheritance lets him travel abroad. His comic, tender journey becomes a search for confidence, romance, and a larger life.

Carl Ericson grows up in Minnesota pulled between hometown expectations, youthful rebellion, and the desire for a bigger life. Lewis treats his path to adulthood as both comedy and a serious search for purpose.

A light early romance about attraction, misunderstanding, and the hope of starting fresh. It is gentler than Lewis's later satires, but already interested in the awkward rules and illusions of courtship.

Una Golden leaves a Pennsylvania town and discovers she has a talent for business in New York. Lewis follows her work, marriage, and independence in a sharp early novel about ambition and the limits placed on women.

A respected bank clerk secretly lives a double life, and Lewis lets the masquerade grow stranger and riskier by the page. This is a sly, psychologically sharp story about identity, performance, and self-deception.

Society daughter Claire Boltwood sets out by automobile for the Pacific Northwest and meets practical, good-humored Milt Daggett on the road. Part romance, part travel comedy, it captures the freedom and chaos of early motoring.

Carol Milford Kennicott arrives in Gopher Prairie hoping to improve small-town life, then runs straight into gossip, routine, and resistance. Lewis's breakthrough novel is both funny and painful in its portrait of provincial America.

Real estate man George F. Babbitt looks like the perfect booster for booming Zenith, until restlessness starts cracking his confident routine. The novel skewers business culture, conformity, and the emptiness behind success.

Idealistic doctor Martin Arrowsmith tries to hold on to scientific truth while moving through small-town practice, public health, and high-powered research. It is a searching novel about medicine, ambition, and compromise.

New York lawyer Ralph Prescott heads into the Saskatchewan wilderness and finds himself tangled in adventure, desire, and rivalry. Lewis turns a remote outpost into a sharp, lively test of masculine vanity and civilized manners.

Smooth, ambitious Elmer Gantry rises through evangelical preaching with charm, appetite, and very little conscience. Lewis's satire takes aim at religious showmanship while giving its swaggering antihero unforgettable energy.

Told through monologues by traveling salesman Lowell Schmaltz, this odd, funny satire circles around Zenith, booster talk, and American self-importance. Lewis uses bragging voice and repetition to expose a culture drunk on its own slogans.

Successful industrialist Sam Dodsworth heads to Europe with his wife and finds that wealth cannot steady a marriage already coming apart. It is one of Lewis's sharpest novels about class, travel, and middle age.

From Midwestern girlhood to reform work and public life, Ann Vickers fights for purpose on her own terms. Lewis gives her a messy, ambitious, deeply human story about politics, prisons, love, and independence.

A hotel man's career becomes Lewis's way into American boosterism, hospitality, and the question of whether honest work can still count as art. It is a social novel about success, taste, and the machinery of business.

When demagogue Buzz Windrip wins the presidency, journalist Doremus Jessup watches American democracy slide toward dictatorship. Lewis mixes political satire with real dread in a novel that still feels unsettlingly close to home.

Written with Lloyd Lewis, this three-act play dramatizes the violent clash between antislavery settlers and proslavery forces in Bleeding Kansas. It reaches back to the border wars to explore idealism, brutality, and political myth.

This volume gathers some of Lewis's best shorter fiction, from social satire to melancholy character sketches. It is a good sampler of how sharp, funny, and surprising he could be outside the novel.

Mr. and Mrs. Cornplow decide they have had enough of being pushed around by their modern, selfish grown children. Lewis turns a family rebellion into a tart comedy about age, money, and generational resentment.

Bethel Merriday wants a life on the stage, and Lewis follows her through touring productions, backstage politics, and hard-earned ambition. It is a theatre novel about performance, reinvention, and the gap between glamour and work.

Gideon Planish is a gifted fraud, always climbing, always networking, and always ready to dress self-interest as public service. Lewis uses him to skewer philanthropy, celebrity reform, and the business of looking virtuous.

Judge Cass Timberlane enters a late marriage that looks promising from the outside but grows complicated once class, age, desire, and expectation set in. Lewis shifts from public satire to intimate domestic drama without losing his bite.

Neil Kingsblood, a respectable white banker in Minnesota, learns his family line includes Black ancestry. Lewis uses his crisis to expose the brutality and absurdity of racism in postwar America.

Set in frontier Minnesota, this late novel follows a missionary trying to bring Christianity to Dakota people while traders and settlers press in. Lewis turns the historical setting into a searching book about faith, power, and cultural collision.

Recently widowed architect Hayden Chart drifts through Florence looking for meaning, beauty, and a place to begin again. Published after Lewis's death, it is a late novel of grief, art, and American restlessness abroad.

These letters from 1919 to 1930 track Lewis from the making of Main Street to the Nobel Prize. They reveal a working writer at full speed, juggling books, business, travel, and ambition.

This posthumous collection gathers autobiographical pieces, essays, and commentary that show Lewis outside the novel. It is the best place to hear his own voice on writing, journalism, fame, and American life.

A varied collection of Lewis stories about outsiders, ambition, romance, and everyday absurdity. The pieces are shorter and lighter than his big novels, but they still carry his gift for social comedy.

This unproduced western screenplay pits frontier ranches against a power-hungry villain in a story meant to echo the politics of World War II. It is Lewis in allegorical mode, turning genre adventure into warning.

These early business stories show Lewis learning how offices, salesmanship, and self-promotion shape American life. The collection is especially good on hustle, petty vanity, and the language people use to sell themselves.

A compact Lewis story about travel, reinvention, and the lure of someplace else. He follows characters who head outward for novelty and freedom, then run into the same vanities and confusions they hoped to leave behind.

These stories return Lewis to the towns, prairies, and social tensions that shaped him. Together they show how often Minnesota gave him his settings, his comic ear, and his feeling for ambition and loneliness.

A classic Boy Scouts adventure full of trails, camp life, rivalries, and rescues. The Eagle Patrol relies on teamwork and practical skills as ordinary outings keep turning into tests of courage.

This large collection traces Lewis's short fiction across nearly his entire career. It lets you watch the early apprentice pieces, the magazine stories, and the mature social satire develop side by side.

An aging Swedish farm laborer comes to Yale to visit the student he idolizes, only to find the world of culture and youth more fragile than he hoped. Lewis balances comedy, class feeling, and real pathos.

A lonely businessman becomes fascinated by a woman he can see across the street in another office. Their meeting turns Lewis's urban romance into a wry story about ambition, loneliness, and mistaken expectations.

A record-breaking cross-country auto run brings fame, risk, and exhaustion together on the open road. Lewis captures the thrill of early speed culture while hinting at the loneliness and danger behind the spectacle.

A child's small, selfish act sets off an absurd chain of consequences that grows wildly beyond anyone's control. Lewis turns everyday chance into a darkly comic fable about causation, accident, and human foolishness.

In a rough city neighborhood, a former policeman keeps watch after his official career is over. Lewis shapes the story as a melodrama of loyalty, danger, and the stubborn pull of public duty.

In Wakamin, neglected Memorial Day traditions stir grief, pride, and stubborn action among older townspeople. Lewis turns a small civic crisis into a tender story about memory, public ritual, and the fading of one generation.

When sudden wealth lifts a Minnesota family into a grander social world, their daughter begins to feel trapped by the possessions that were supposed to free her. Lewis makes material success feel claustrophobic and sad.

When widow Harri arrives in New Kotka, Minnesota, with two children, the town expects a quiet struggle for survival. Instead, Lewis gives them a formidable woman whose drive unsettles local habits, gossip, and power.

In these lively travel pieces, Lewis writes about riding the road, catching lifts, and watching America from the passenger seat. They are funny, observant snapshots of early car culture and the people who made it go.