Analysis of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 10, 2025

Arrowsmith was one of five major novels that Sinclair Lewis wrote in the 1920s and the one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was turned into a popular movie in 1931 starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. A best-seller, like his Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith critiqued a privileged sector of American society: medicine.

Because both Main Street and Babbitt had been recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the Pulitzer Prize Committee and overruled by the trustees of Columbia University—and because he said he did not believe in contests for writers—Lewis turned the prize down, an action that brought him much publicity and increased sales of his novel. As he wrote to Alfred Harcourt, his publisher, shortly before the award was made public:

“I hope they do award me the Pulitzer prize on Arrowsmith—but you know, don’t you, that ever since the Main Street burglary, I have planned that if they ever did award it to me, I would refuse it, with a polite but firm letter which I shall let the press have, and which ought to make it impossible for any one ever to accept the novel prize (not the play or history prize) thereafter without acknowledging themselves as willing to sell out” (quoted in Smith, 203).

Lewis was ever the iconoclast, willing to take on such aspects of American society as business, religion, and medicine, and hold them up to intense scrutiny—both infuriating and delighting his readers with his blistering criticism. He is praised by many, including his biographers Mark Schorer and Richard Lingeman, for his intense research into the topics for his novels.

That he was the son of a doctor gave him insight into the story of a young man who becomes a doctor and must later choose between being a practicing physician and a researcher. Lewis saw himself in the idealist character of Arrowsmith, having written an obituary in 1941, ten years before his death, called “The Death of Arrowsmith.”

For the novel, Paul De Kruif, a young research scientist who eventually became a popular science writer with his book Microbe Hunters, helped Lewis. They even traveled to the Caribbean to research the people and climate there—something that became important in the novel when Martin Arrowsmith must balance fighting the plague with researching the efficacy of a new vaccine. James Hutchisson sees De Kruif’s contribution as important because he not only helped with research but related his experiences, supplied prototypes for characters, and from his “personal philosophy Lewis extracted the basis for Arrowsmith’s idealism,” contributing to the creation of this “heroic novel” (Hutchisson, 97).

During the course of the novel, Arrowsmith goes from general practitioner and part-time veterinarian to a public health official to a researcher at a prominent medical facility. Lewis seems to be proposing a spectrum for the medical profession from pure research to pure business, and each of Martin’s experiences places him somewhere along that continuum.

When young Martin first becomes interested in medicine, he helps Doc Vickerson, an alcoholic old general practitioner in his hometown. At medical school, he is caught between the austere teachings of the Jewish Dr. Max Gottlieb—professor of bacteriology and dedicated researcher—and Dr. Lloyd Davidson, a popular professor whose main contribution to Martin’s education is to teach “the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him” (Lewis, 41).

His stint as assistant director of public health sees him helping a man whose idea of health advocacy is to write poems about fly-swatters and spitting. When Martin becomes a researcher at the famous McGurk Institute and is able to concentrate on scientific investigation rather than patients, he should be happy. Yet despite his seeming success, Martin becomes miserable as he is urged to develop practical results for his experiments in order to bring renown and research dollars to the institute.

Because of an inability to simultaneously maintain serious personal relationships and a career, at the end he retreats to the New England woods to stay true to his mistress of research, telling his baby son:

“Come to me when you grow up, old man” (Lewis, 443).

Arrowsmith still speaks to contemporary concerns about how medicine is practiced and paid for. In our current era, when doctors and medical researchers feel as though they are being forced to choose between proper scientific controls and compassion for AIDS sufferers, the problems of Lewis’s Martin Arrowsmith have a significant resonance.

His ethical dilemma arises from the conflict between the scientific objectivity required of him by the medical research industry and the real pain and suffering of the sick. This conflict is actualized for him when he and his colleagues are invited to a Caribbean island nation to test an antidote for plague:

“He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though still he resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation to give up the possible saving of millions for the immediate saving of thousands” (Lewis, 374).

But because of his scientific objectivity, he and a dedicated Black doctor divide all the inhabitants into two groups: one group will be given an experimental vaccine, and the control group will receive nothing.

The rational constructions that the scientists have built up between themselves and their feelings are destroyed for Arrowsmith when his beloved wife, Leora, catches the plague and dies while he is still dividing the population into the saved and the condemned. In response to this emotional and psychological pain, he gives vaccine to all the sick, bringing on the wrath of his colleagues but receiving the acclaim of the public.

Later, his medical institute praises him because the sale of the plague vaccine brings them millions in profits. The hypocrisy that Arrowsmith faces causes him to redefine himself in relation to his profession and his feelings. Through Arrowsmith’s problems, Lewis exposes the discourse of the medical profession and the ideology it supports.

Sources

Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925.
———. “The Death of Arrowsmith.” Coronet, July 1941. Reprinted in The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane, 104–107. New York: Random House, 1953.
Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.
Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.
Smith, Harrison, ed. From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.