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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Job," Sinclair Lewis crafts a penetrating narrative that explores the complexities of ambition, gender roles, and the pursuit of identity within the tumultuous landscape of early 20th-century America. The novel follows the life of a young woman, Helen, who grapples with the constraints of societal expectations while pursuing her career in a male-dominated publishing industry. Lewis employs sharp satire and vivid characterization to reveal the struggles of individuals striving for professional and personal fulfillment, all while navigating the social mores of the time, indicative of the Modernist literary movement that sought to reflect the disillusionment of a rapidly evolving society. Sinclair Lewis was a pioneering figure in American literature and the first novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. His own experiences growing up in a small town and observing the societal shifts during the Progressive Era profoundly shaped his narrative style and thematic concerns. Lewis's keen insight into the human condition and his critical lens on American culture are evident in "The Job," making it a forerunner in feminist literature and a true reflection of the zeitgeist of his time. I highly recommend "The Job" to readers seeking an incisive look at the struggles of self-actualization against societal constraints. Lewis's timeless exploration of ambition, gender, and identity offers valuable insights that remain pertinent today, making this novel a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the evolution of American literature and gender dynamics. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Job
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young woman chooses a desk over a parlor and walks into the thrum of modern America. Sinclair Lewis’s The Job traces the friction between private desire and public opportunity at the dawn of the white-collar age, asking what a career can grant and what it exacts. Set amid offices, employment bureaus, boardinghouses, and shopfronts, the novel studies how ambition, respectability, and survival intersect for a woman determined to earn her way. With patient realism and alert social insight, Lewis watches the ledger books and the human heart with equal attention, revealing the cost, dignity, and allure of salaried life.
Though less famous than Main Street or Babbitt, The Job has earned its classic status by being one of the earliest American novels to give sustained, serious attention to a woman’s professional life. It enlarges the scope of the social novel, moving beyond mills and factories to the new empire of desks, telephones, and typewriters. Lewis’s clear-eyed attention to office routines and moral compromises anticipates the corporate satires he would later refine. Readers and scholars recognize in this book a pioneering portrait of modern urban work, a bridge between nineteenth-century realism and the twentieth century’s examination of business culture and identity.
Written by Sinclair Lewis and first published in 1917, The Job belongs to the Progressive Era, when American cities expanded and clerical labor surged. The novel follows a young woman who leaves small-town constraints for the opportunities and hazards of urban office work, particularly in New York’s bustling commercial environment. Lewis, who would become the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, uses this earlier novel to develop his characteristic method: precise observation of institutions and the people molded by them. The focus is not sensational events but the everyday grind through which character, hope, and compromise are tested.
Lewis’s purpose in The Job is to investigate the promises and limits of the business civilization he saw remaking the United States. He examines how organizations hire, promote, and discipline; how pay stubs and office hierarchies shape choices; and how a working woman’s reputation can be both a resource and a risk. Without revealing the plot’s turns, it is fair to say the book is less a fable with a moral than a social anatomy. Lewis writes to illuminate lived processes—the effort to belong, to be solvent, to be taken seriously—rather than to provide consolations or tidy answers.
The city in The Job is a teacher and a test. Its rush-hour streets, crowded boardinghouses, and fluorescent offices form an arena in which stamina and tact matter as much as talent. By elevating stenography, filing systems, and sales meetings to narrative importance, Lewis helped make the office legible as a distinct social world. The details—clattering machines, demanding clients, the rhythm of paydays—are never merely scenic. They are pressures that shape speech, gesture, and judgment. In following this world with documentary care, the novel provides a textured record of how modern work reorganized time, ambition, and the very idea of success.
At the heart of the book stands Una Golden, a capable and observant protagonist whose decisions are governed by both aspiration and necessity. Her path from small-town beginnings to urban workplaces sketches a new, precarious map of American possibility. She gathers skills, negotiates wages, and navigates the tacit codes of colleagues and supervisors. She also learns the emotional arithmetic of a life measured in hours billed and weekends borrowed. While the novel respects her determination, it refuses easy victories, insisting that progress comes in hard-won increments. Through Una’s perspective, readers encounter the subtle textures of hope, fatigue, pride, and compromise.
The Job confronts gendered double standards with steadiness instead of polemics. It shows how a woman must manage scrutiny that her male counterparts seldom face, and how respectability can be both shield and shackle. Office gossip, landlords’ expectations, and the implicit rules of social outings all carry professional consequences. Yet the novel is no tract. It is attentive to the many calculations—when to speak, when to stay, when to seek a new post—that define a working life. In this, Lewis anticipates debates about autonomy and opportunity that continue, making the book a quietly radical account of women’s economic citizenship.
Lewis also interrogates the grammar of American business—its confidence in efficiency, its romance with salesmanship, and its faith in upward mobility. Advertising, client cultivation, and managerial performance reviews are not decorative subjects; they are engines that reconfigure identity. The novel tracks how organizations extract loyalty and time in exchange for status, and how the rhetoric of progress can conceal exhaustion. These concerns forecast themes Lewis would sharpen in his later work, where the civic and personal costs of boosterism are laid bare. In The Job, the critique is less thunderous but no less incisive, grounded in the texture of ordinary experience.
Stylistically, The Job is plainspoken and exact, using steady accumulation of incident to form its portrait. The prose balances satirical edge with empathy, allowing characters their contradictions and context. The structure is episodic but purposeful, moving through offices, neighborhoods, and seasons to suggest how routine reshapes conviction. Dialogue and detail work together to create the feeling of overheard life—what people say about prospects, rent, and prospects again. Rather than flourish or melodrama, Lewis relies on proportion and selection, a method that makes the revelations feel earned. The result is a narrative that clarifies without simplifying, and critiques without condescension.
In literary history, The Job occupies an important, if understated, node in Sinclair Lewis’s development. It precedes the string of major novels that secured his international reputation, yet it already demonstrates his signature approach: social mapping, institutional critique, and a keen ear for American speech. It also broadens the canvas of the American novel by recognizing office labor as a subject worthy of serious art. While not the most celebrated of his books, it has influenced the tradition of workplace fiction and enriched discussions of early twentieth-century urban realism, especially in narratives centered on women’s paid labor and the cultural meanings of professionalism.
The book’s relevance today is striking. Debates over pay equity, promotion pipelines, burnout, and work-life balance echo through Lewis’s pages. The technologies and dress codes have changed, but the dilemmas of recognition, security, and self-respect remain familiar. Readers will recognize the quiet heroism of showing up, the calculation behind every career move, and the fragile bargains that hold offices together. For those interested in the origins of corporate culture, The Job offers a ground-level view of how such cultures form and function. For those concerned with gender and work, it offers a lucid, humane account of the costs and possibilities of independence.
To read The Job is to encounter a clear-eyed, compassionate anatomy of modern aspiration. Its lasting appeal lies in its measured tone, its attention to ordinary labor, and its refusal to confuse sentiment with truth. Lewis neither glamorizes nor condemns the world he depicts; he renders it, and in the rendering reveals its ethics. The themes—ambition, dignity, constraint, and the search for meaningful autonomy—remain urgent. As a portrait of a woman crafting a life within the machinery of a new century, the novel still speaks to contemporary readers, inviting them to weigh what constitutes success and what, in the end, one is willing to trade.
Synopsis
Sinclair Lewis’s The Job follows Una Golden, a young woman from a small town who seeks economic independence in the early twentieth century. Raised amid modest expectations and domestic routines, Una grows increasingly aware of the limits placed on women by family duty and social custom. The need to support herself, coupled with a desire for broader horizons, prompts her to leave home. The narrative begins with this transition from provincial life to a modern, urban environment. It establishes Una’s practical temperament, her cautious optimism, and the cultural context of expanding clerical work, setting the stage for a story centered on ambition, survival, and changing gender roles.
Upon arriving in New York, Una navigates boardinghouse life, tight finances, and the challenge of finding respectable employment. She trains in stenography and typewriting, the gateway skills available to women at the time, and secures an entry-level position. The office is portrayed as brisk and hierarchical, where efficiency is prized but conformity is silently enforced. Wages are low, hours are long, and minor errors carry outsized consequences. Through Una’s learning curve—balancing speed with accuracy, serving superiors, and absorbing unspoken etiquette—the novel offers a concrete picture of clerical labor. Early friendships with fellow workers provide companionship and perspective on a shared, precarious livelihood.
As Una grows more competent, she moves among firms in search of higher pay and greater responsibility. She begins to understand the subtleties of office politics, including the tension between being seen as agreeable and being recognized as capable. Supervisors evaluate not only her work but her demeanor, reflecting expectations that women remain pleasant and unobtrusive. Small promotions grant limited authority, and occasional mentors offer advice on negotiating raises, timing departures, and managing reputations. The narrative emphasizes incremental progress and the discipline required to avoid missteps. It illustrates how even routine tasks—filing, dictation, correspondence—can become stepping-stones if approached with persistence and strategic patience.
Parallel to Una’s work life, social experiences shape her choices and outlook. Evenings after work involve modest entertainments, discussions about literature and politics, and encounters that hint at romance. Prospective suitors represent different futures: one promises stability and traditional domesticity, another suggests adventure but uncertain prospects. The expectations of family and friends weigh on her, particularly the assumption that a woman’s natural endpoint is marriage. Una’s hesitation reflects both practical concerns—financial security, autonomy—and a growing commitment to professional identity. These personal interactions, understated yet consequential, deepen the portrait of a woman balancing intimate aspirations with the demands and opportunities of a swiftly modernizing city.
A pivotal step occurs when Una seeks more than clerical routine and takes on responsibilities closer to sales, promotion, or real estate work—fields that reward initiative and public confidence. Negotiating a better salary and asserting her value become essential tests. The offices she enters are larger, faster, and more visibly competitive, demanding tact with clients and composure under pressure. Through careful preparation and a willingness to handle visible assignments, she begins to demonstrate results that cannot be dismissed as mere diligence. These successes grant her a measure of financial independence and a clearer professional reputation, while also exposing her to sharper scrutiny and heightened expectations.
The narrative acknowledges cycles of prosperity and instability that affect Una’s trajectory. Reorganizations, shifting markets, and management changes threaten hard-won gains, forcing her to reassess strategy and adapt skills. She learns to read the business climate, to anticipate demands, and to temper enthusiasm with caution. Setbacks, such as stalled projects or office conflicts, underscore the impersonal logic of large organizations. Yet the city’s scale also creates new paths: referrals, side assignments, and unexpected openings. By portraying both advancement and reversal, the book presents the workplace as a system in which competence matters but timing and resilience are equally vital to survival and growth.
As Una’s professional profile solidifies, her personal crossroads intensify. A serious proposal or a deepening attachment brings the question of marriage to the forefront, framed not as a purely private matter but as a decision with economic and social ramifications. Colleagues and acquaintances offer conflicting counsel: some urge security, others applaud independence. Una weighs compatibility, mutual respect, and long-term plans against the daily realities of work. The novel situates these deliberations within broader norms—double standards in reputation, assumptions about women’s proper sphere—while keeping the focus on practical consequences. The tension between private happiness and public competence becomes a central axis of the story.
A crisis—professional, personal, or both—tests Una’s capacity to hold together her aspirations. Unexpected obligations, moral compromises, or shifting loyalties force her to choose what to keep and what to relinquish. Without resolving every thread, the narrative clarifies the book’s title: the job is not only a position but a task of self-definition amid external pressures. Una’s response emphasizes method over impulse, valuing steadiness and clarity even when outcomes remain uncertain. The episode crystallizes themes introduced earlier: the dignity of work, the price of progress, and the possibility of forging a life that acknowledges constraint without surrendering initiative.
In its concluding movement, the book presents a tempered vision of modern womanhood shaped by the rhythms of business. Una reaches a measure of stability that reflects both achievement and compromise. The portrait avoids extremes, neither celebrating effortless triumph nor lamenting inevitable defeat. Instead, it suggests that purpose emerges through sustained effort and realistic appraisal. The city has given Una access to experience, income, and identity, while also imposing trade-offs. The Job thereby conveys an overall message about work as participation in a larger social order: meaningful, imperfect, and continuous, with progress measured in practical steps rather than final, decisive victories.
Historical Context
Sinclair Lewis’s The Job unfolds in the United States during the high tide of the Progressive Era, roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, with its action concentrated in New York City and nearby New Jersey. The novel’s milieu is the urban world of offices, firms, and burgeoning corporate bureaucracies that clustered in Manhattan’s commercial districts as skyscrapers rose and electric transit intensified commuter flows. The setting mirrors a historical pivot: from a small-town nineteenth-century society to a twentieth-century metropolis defined by white-collar work, advertising, real estate speculation, and standardized routines. Streetcars and the new subway knit together dense neighborhoods, while typewriters, telephones, and filing systems transformed daily labor.
The physical and social geography of the book’s world includes boardinghouses, respectable cafés, and department stores frequented by salaried office employees, many of them women. Manhattan’s increasingly vertical skyline and the growth of offices in Midtown and the Financial District created new spaces, expectations, and hazards for ambitious workers. Across the Hudson, New Jersey’s commuter towns—linked by ferries, the 1908 Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (later PATH), and the 1910 Pennsylvania Station—supplied clerks and stenographers to the city’s firms. The period’s proprieties shaped conduct in offices and on streets, with reputations guarded by strict gendered codes. This time-and-place context situates the novel’s exploration of salaried life and constrained social mobility.
The Progressive Era (circa 1890s–1920s) brought rapid urbanization, corporate consolidation, and reformist efforts to regulate industrial capitalism. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) and Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) championed antitrust measures, creating the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and strengthening oversight via the Clayton Act the same year. Cities invested in sanitation, transit, and public education, while muckraking journalism exposed urban conditions. The Job mirrors this milieu by portraying how corporate routines, professional hierarchies, and reform-minded rhetoric coexisted. Through its heroine’s pursuit of salaried advancement amid bureaucratic procedures, the book dramatizes Progressivism’s promise of efficiency and fairness alongside persistent inequities that reform could not easily remedy.
The rise of white-collar office work transformed women’s employment between 1890 and 1915. Typewriters, telephones, and standardized paperwork expanded clerical staffs, and firms sought literate, punctual workers at modest wages. By 1910, women constituted a rapidly growing share of clerical employees in major cities; hundreds of thousands held positions as stenographers, bookkeepers, and filing clerks, often earning $8–$15 per week in New York. Career ladders remained narrow, with men favored for managerial posts and women concentrated in subordinate roles. The Job centers on a woman navigating this landscape, representing both the new opportunities and the structural barriers that clerical expansion created. Its office scenes embody the technologies, pay scales, and gendered ceilings that defined the era.
The women’s suffrage movement culminated nationally in the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified 1920) after a decade of high-profile activism. In New York, mass parades (1911–1915), street-corner campaigning, and a successful state referendum in 1917 marked decisive advances. Organizations such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Party pressed for political rights alongside workplace reforms. The Job, published in 1917, reflects the ferment that preceded federal enfranchisement: its portrait of a woman seeking economic autonomy resonates with contemporary claims for civic equality. Though not a suffrage tract, the novel’s emphasis on self-supporting female respectability and competence echoes arguments suffragists used to justify political inclusion.
Workplace safety and protective labor legislation advanced after disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, which killed 146 workers and catalyzed sweeping reforms. The New York State Factory Investigating Commission (1911–1915), led by Robert F. Wagner and Al Smith, produced laws regulating fire exits, hours, and conditions. The Supreme Court’s Muller v. Oregon decision (1908) upheld maximum-hour laws for women, embedding a protective approach that was both progressive and paternalistic. The Job situates office workers adjacent to these debates: while clerical spaces differed from factories, the novel’s attention to discipline, hours, and supervision reflects the era’s broader regulation of women’s labor and the ambiguities of “protection.”
Advertising emerged as a powerful national industry in the early twentieth century, centered in New York and Chicago. Firms such as J. Walter Thompson, Ayer & Son, and Lord & Thomas developed market research, brand strategy, and persuasive copy, aided by mass magazines and newspapers. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act curbed fraudulent claims for patent medicines, while the Federal Trade Commission (1914) began policing unfair practices, formalizing a regulated marketplace of persuasion. The Job draws directly on this world: its depiction of salaried copywork, client cultivation, and the ethics of persuasion reflects the rise of professional advertising. Lewis’s familiarity with magazine publishing and commercial writing lends the novel’s office scenes the procedural detail of a new industry.
Urban real estate and infrastructure boomed as New York modernized. The Interborough Rapid Transit subway opened in 1904, the Queensboro Bridge in 1909, and Pennsylvania Station in 1910; such projects reshaped commuting and property values. Loft buildings and skyscrapers, capped by the Woolworth Building (1913), concentrated corporate offices in Lower Manhattan, while uptown avenues drew retail and service firms. Speculation, zoning debates (the 1916 Zoning Resolution), and suburban expansion to New Jersey and the outer boroughs reorganized urban life into rented rooms, commuters’ trains, and workplaces far from home. The Job reflects this built environment by tracing how office employees navigate rents, transit schedules, and the aspirational promise real estate offered to ambitious strivers.
The Panic of 1907 was a severe financial crisis triggered by failed speculation in October 1907, a run on the Knickerbocker Trust Company, and cascading liquidity shortages. J. P. Morgan orchestrated emergency syndicates to stabilize banks and the stock exchange, revealing the fragility of credit-dependent corporations. The crisis spurred passage of the Federal Reserve Act (1913), creating a central bank to manage currency and reserves. The Job’s focus on precarious salaried careers, sudden retrenchments, and anxious managers reflects this volatile business climate. Its characters’ awareness that promotions can vanish with market shocks mirrors the post-1907 recognition that white-collar security was conditional on forces beyond individual merit.
Mass immigration transformed New York between 1900 and 1914, when roughly 13 million immigrants entered the United States, with a peak of over one million arrivals in 1907. Ellis Island processed newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe, who crowded into tenements and joined manufacturing, service, and clerical labor markets. Ethnic neighborhoods, mutual-aid societies, and nativist tensions shaped urban daily life. The Job, set in offices drawing from this diverse population, implicitly registers the cosmopolitan composition of the workforce and the social boundaries within it. The novel’s attention to respectability and advancement reflects the period’s delicate negotiations among class, ethnicity, and the norms governing mixed urban workplaces.
World War I (1914–1918) altered American society, especially after U.S. entry in April 1917. Mobilization redirected industry, inflation rose, and many men left offices for military or war-related work, opening temporary opportunities for women. The Espionage Act (1917) and wartime propaganda also shaped public discourse. Although The Job was published in 1917 and primarily portrays prewar corporate life, its closing horizon sits on the brink of wartime transformation. The book’s emphasis on efficiency, loyalty to firms, and the moral language of duty anticipates the vocabulary that wartime agencies and employers would soon deploy to frame work as a patriotic contribution.
Debates about sexuality, respectability, and birth control accelerated during the 1910s. The federal Comstock Act of 1873 restricted dissemination of contraceptive information, yet activists like Margaret Sanger opened a birth-control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, faced arrest, and won a partial legal opening in the 1918 Crane decision permitting physicians to advise for health reasons. Such controversies affected office women, whose reputations could make or break careers. The Job reflects this moral environment by highlighting the narrow codes governing female independence, courtship, and marriage alongside paid employment. Its scenarios reveal how women’s economic agency remained entangled with legal and cultural constraints on bodily autonomy.
The temperance movement, spearheaded by the Anti-Saloon League (founded 1893) and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, culminated in national Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment (ratified 1919) and the Volstead Act (1919). Even before nationwide enactment, local dry laws reshaped social settings. For office workers, alcohol’s status influenced client entertainment, after-hours sociability, and “respectable” leisure venues. The Job registers this moral economy indirectly: its urban scenes favor cafés, tearooms, and orderly public spaces that mark a respectable separation from saloon culture. The book’s portrait of disciplined, sober office life reflects a broader drive to tame urban pleasures in the name of efficiency and moral order.
Scientific management and the broader efficiency movement, associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), encouraged time studies, standard operating procedures, and incentive systems in factories and offices. Business education expanded at institutions like the Wharton School (1881) and Harvard Business School (1908), feeding firms with trained managers committed to quantifiable results. Clerical departments adopted filing standards, dictation protocols, and measurable quotas. The Job mirrors this ethos through meticulous depictions of routines, productivity expectations, and the managerial gaze. Its characters navigate evaluation systems that promise rational advancement yet in practice reproduce gendered hierarchies, exposing the human costs of a bureaucratic ideal of efficiency.
The Great Migration began during World War I, with African Americans moving from the Jim Crow South to northern cities such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit to seek industrial jobs and escape disenfranchisement. Harlem grew as a Black neighborhood in New York during the 1910s, reshaping labor markets, housing, and culture. While The Job does not centrally depict Black office workers, the novel’s urban setting lies within this demographic transformation, which intensified competition for housing and accelerated the sorting of workplaces by race, gender, and skill. The book’s focus on status anxiety and precarious respectability resonates with the stratifications reinforced amid this migration.
Municipal politics and reform framed New York’s business environment. Tammany Hall’s patronage networks coexisted with reform mayors and commissions seeking transparent administration after city consolidation in 1898. Zoning (1916), building codes, licensing, and transit franchises shaped where firms located, how high they built, and how employees commuted. Developers and advertisers capitalized on civic improvements to market offices and neighborhoods. The Job reflects these conditions through its attention to leases, rents, and the invisible web of permits and custom that define urban opportunity. By situating ambition within a city governed by both rules and favors, the novel captures the political texture of doing business.
The book functions as a social critique by exposing how early twentieth-century corporate modernity promised meritocratic mobility while imposing gendered ceilings, moral double standards, and economic precarity. Through a woman’s salaried career in New York, it reveals the paradox whereby expanded opportunities in clerical and advertising work were constrained by pay gaps, promotion barriers, and reputational policing. It indicts a culture that equated efficiency with virtue, sidelining care and fairness, and it interrogates consumer capitalism’s tendency to commodify aspiration. By dramatizing class anxieties, urban costs, and bureaucratic indifference, the novel critiques the era’s optimistic reform rhetoric and the inequities embedded in its celebrated progress.
Author Biography
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist and incisive social satirist whose work defined a powerful critique of early twentieth-century United States life. The first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, he examined small-town mores, middle-class conformity, professional ambition, religious fervor, and the pressures of modern business and advertising. His novels combined reportorial detail with comic bite, creating archetypal figures that entered the national vocabulary. Through portraits of doctors, salesmen, ministers, and civic boosters, he questioned the distance between American ideals and everyday practice. His career spanned more than three decades, producing widely read books that still provoke debate.
Raised in a Midwestern town whose rhythms and expectations shaped his imagination, Lewis pursued higher education at Yale University, where he contributed to student publications and honed an appetite for contemporary debate. He worked various editorial and reporting jobs before turning fully to fiction, absorbing currents of American realism and European social satire. Writers who prized observational accuracy and social analysis influenced his method, and he remained attentive to public argument and journalistic inquiry. That mix of campus training, newsroom habits, and voracious reading fashioned a prose style at once plainspoken and barbed, capable of cataloging the surfaces of ordinary life while exposing their contradictions.
Before the 1920s, Lewis published a series of apprentice novels that helped him find his subjects and tone. Works such as Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, and Free Air reveal a writer testing angles on modern work, mobility, and aspiration. He also sold short fiction to prominent magazines, learning how popular taste and social observation could reinforce one another. The pages of these early books display his eye for occupational detail and social types. While critical response was modest, they laid the groundwork for larger, more cohesive satires, establishing a recurring interest in how American boosterism shaped individual lives.
His breakthrough arrived with Main Street, a best seller that turned a sharp lens on provincial town life and ignited nationwide discussion. Babbitt followed, giving a name to complacent business boosterism and cementing his reputation as a major satirist of the American middle class. Arrowsmith, a study of science, medicine, and ethics, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis famously declined, asserting a principle of artistic independence. Elmer Gantry’s portrait of revivalist zeal and Dodsworth’s exploration of marriage and mobility broadened his range. Across these novels, he refined a method that combined documentary sweep with caricatural edge, provoking both admiration and discomfort.
In 1930 Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognition that underscored the international resonance of his critiques. The decade saw continued productivity and public engagement. He experimented with narrative voices in The Man Who Knew Coolidge, examined women’s professional and civic aspirations in Ann Vickers, and explored the art world in Work of Art. Responding to the global rise of authoritarian movements, he wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a cautionary tale about political demagoguery in the United States. Alongside his fiction, Lewis lectured widely, arguing that American literature should face social realities without evasion and that satire could serve democratic self-scrutiny.
In the 1940s Lewis extended his institutional portraits and social diagnoses. Gideon Planish satirized academic fund-raising and organizational culture, while Bethel Merriday traced the apprentice life of an actor. Cass Timberlane examined professional life, law, and marriage in a Midwestern setting, and Kingsblood Royal confronted the nation’s racial hierarchies through a narrative of identity and citizenship. Reception in these years was mixed, yet readers and critics continued to acknowledge his unmatched capacity to render everyday speech, business routines, and civic rituals. His long practice of fieldwork-like observation—listening, traveling, and noting particulars—remained central to the realism that anchored even his broadest satire.
In his later years, Lewis alternated between periods of travel, residence abroad, and steady writing, producing additional novels into the late 1940s and early 1950s. He died in 1951, by which time his coinages and characters had entered both literary history and common speech. Main Street and Babbitt in particular endure as touchstones for debates about community, ambition, and conformity, while Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and It Can’t Happen Here continue to attract readers for their institutional portraits and political relevance. His legacy lies in a distinctly American mode of social fiction—skeptical yet engaged—that encourages ongoing argument about national ideals and everyday life.
The Job
Part I THE CITY
CHAPTER I
1
CAPTAIN LEW GOLDEN would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been “captain” of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company[1], but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.
He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House ’bus-driver. He never used the word “beauty” except in reference to a setter dog — beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled home, and remarked that they were “nice.” He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church[2], which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.
He believed that “Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybod[1q]y.”
This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.
Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely discontented; not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a conviction that she would have been a romantic person “if she hadn’t married Mr. Golden — not but what he’s a fine man and very bright and all, but he hasn’t got much imagination or any, well, romance!”
She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired to learn French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer suffrage movement she took no part — she didn’t “think it was quite ladylike.” ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy, but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and — if you weren’t impatient with her slackness — you found her a wistful and touching figure in her slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still retained at fifty-five.
She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother — sympathetic, forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded; she merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.
She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.
Una Golden was a “good little woman” — not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things; naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy woman’s simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance, and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.
She was not — and will not be — a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored novels.
She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from the high school — in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new organdy — to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties and unmethodically read books from the town library — Walter Scott, Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, How to Know the Birds, My Year in the Holy Land, Home Needlework, Sartor Resartus, and Ships that Pass in the Night. Her residue of knowledge from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania.
She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife, who would entertain the Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.
Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry. She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid; indeterminate as a moving cloud.
Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her “Puss,” and want to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all, when you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of faded gold, and her rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear. These glasses made a business-like center to her face; you felt that without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips, and the thick ankles which she considered “common,” she was rather anemic. Her cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a pale pink. Her chin was plucky and undimpled; it was usually spotted with one or two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so well covered with powder that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them except Una herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously examined in the mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew that they were the result of the indigestible Golden family meals; she tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls; but they kept startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a worried forefinger, and wonder whether men were able to see anything else in her face.
You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan mackintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress eye-glasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished littleness.
She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of beauty which most captivated men, though every year she was more shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men. That a woman’s business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man, and consequent security, was her unmeditated faith — till, in 1905, when Una was twenty-four years old, her father died.
2
Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts, and eleven hundred dollars in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely over before neighbors — the furniture man, the grocer, the polite old homeopathic doctor — began to come in with bland sympathy and large bills. When the debts were all cleared away the Goldens had only six hundred dollars and no income beyond the good name. All right-minded persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies, but Una would have preferred less honor and more rubies.
She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved for her father. She took charge of everything — money, house, bills.
Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence — and at the same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una’s shoulder; she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work.
One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by her insistence that she is an “old maid,” she makes the thought of her barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and “wants to keep in touch with her daughter’s interests,” only, her daughter has no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to stay alone, had she acquired “interests,” she might have meant something in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to hasten back to mother), and even “wonders why daughter doesn’t take an interest in girls her own age.” That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house — the mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....
There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a teacher.
Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously inefficient workmen will take to do “a certain piece of work.” Una was honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher, that she neither loved masses of other people’s children nor had any ideals of developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course she would teach!
When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always ended by suggesting, “I wonder if perhaps you couldn’t go back to school-teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful. And maybe I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much.”
Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she never suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on recklessly investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to find other work in Panama.
Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill-slopes. But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores, and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word “feminist” meant.
This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:
She could — and probably would — teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.
She could marry, but no one seemed to want her, except old Henry Carson, the widower, with catarrh and three children, who called on her and her mother once in two weeks, and would propose whenever she encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she positively and ungratefully didn’t want to marry Henry and listen to his hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one of The Boys might propose. But in a small town it was all a gamble. There weren’t so very many desirable young men — most of the energetic ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.
She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town women. But she really couldn’t afford to do any of these; and, besides, she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Sousa and Victor Herbert; she was afraid of lawyers; blood made her sick; and her voice was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practised by several satin-waisted, semi-artistic ladies who “gave readings” of Enoch Arden and Evangeline before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual Chautauqua.
She could have a job selling dry-goods behind the counter in the Hub Store, but that meant loss of caste.
She could teach dancing — but she couldn’t dance particularly well. And that was all that she could do.
She had tried to find work as office-woman for Dr. Mayberry, the dentist; in the office of the Panama Wood-Turning Company; in the post-office; as lofty enthroned cashier for the Hub Store; painting place-cards and making “fancy-work” for the Art Needlework Exchange.
The job behind the counter in the Hub Store was the only one offered her.
“If I were only a boy,” sighed Una, “I could go to work in the hardware-store or on the railroad or anywhere, and not lose respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman.”
3
Una had been trying to persuade her father’s old-time rival, Squire Updegraff, the real-estate and insurance man, that her experience with Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire Updegraff had leaped up at her entrance, and blared, “Well, well, and how is the little girl making it?” He had set out a chair for her and held her hand. But he knew that her only experience with her father’s affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden’s account-books, which were works of genius in so far as they were composed according to the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their elaborate discussion of giving Una a job.
It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short street, between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched lumber-wagons. Nellie Page, the town belle, tripping by in canvas sneakers and a large red hair-ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie Martindale, of the First National Bank, nodded to her, but these exquisites were too young for her; they danced too well and laughed too easily. The person who stopped her for a long curbstone conference about the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the fateful Henry Carson. The village sun was unusually blank and hard on Henry’s bald spot to-day. Heavens! she cried to herself, in almost hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry?
Miss Mattie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Mattie had taught at Clark’s Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens! thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry?
“I won’t be genteel! I’ll work in The Hub or any place first!” Una declared. While she trudged home — a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy — a cataract of protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to meet that doddering old Mr. Mosely, who was unavoidably bearing down on her now, and be held by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was nothing amusing to do! She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from Mr. Henry Carson.
She wanted — wanted some one to love, to talk with. Why had she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she wanted, yes, yes! that was it, she wanted youth, she who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless some one, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets like piles of lumber.
