Sinclair Lewis is perhaps best known for his many novels: including Main Street, Babbit, Arrowsmith and others. But he wrote many stories throughout his career of which he personally selected his favorites for the collection: Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis. Some of these stories mirror the themes that inhabit his novels. They are all vivid with colorful and concrete detail that reminds this Midwestern boy of his roots. The stories range widely from a satiric piece about a boy movie star that reminds me of Twain's The Prince and the Pauper to romantic trysts and tales of isolation and loneliness. All the stories are fun to read and remind me of the best of Lewis. ( )

This collection of short stories portrays US society of a bygone age, a time of civic pride and patriotic parades, when towns were growing into small cities, and farming was giving way to industry. Six of the 13 stories date to 1919 or before, and the remainder to the early 1930s. Many of the stories brim with optimism and energy; as Lewis notes in his preface, the earliest stories “are so certain that large, bulky Americans are going to do something and do it quickly and help the whole world by doing it.” Even writing from the advanced perspective of 1935, Lewis noted that the earliest stories “belong to an era as distant now and strange as the days of Queen Victoria or of Noah’s ark”. Nearly 75 years later, such stories portray a world alien to our own, but familiar in its nostalgic evocation of a shared national mythos.

These short stories are charming and entertaining; the satire is gentle and the human portrayals sympathetic and affectionate. They show none of the biting satire or heavy-handedness of some of Lewis’ most successful novels. Even when a “Babbitt” appears (as in Go East Young Man), he is quite a likeable sort. Indeed the Sinclair Lewis that emerges is less a satirist or even a realist, than a romantic whose idealism is tempered by sympathy for the foibles and limitations of human beings.

If one wanted to find fault, one could note that the several of the stories have a commercial feel (among them the self-consciously cute Let's Play Kings, which at 90 pages goes on for much too long, and the blatantly nationalistic Kidnaped Memorial.) Such is understandable, given their publication in magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and the original Cosmopolitan . Further, the stories have a provincial focus, because Lewis chose not to deal with the great events of the day -- there is no mention of the Great Depression or the growing international tensions of the 1930s, and the First World War is mentioned in only one story. Lewis was neither a Steinbeck nor a Hemingway, and he portrayed what he knew best -- life in the small mid-western towns and cities with which he was familiar from his youth.

In this reviewer's opinion, among the most memorable stories of this collection are the following: Things (an ironic portrayal of the pretensions of materialism and newfound wealth), Land (that shows a father and son torn between an agricultural past and entrepreneurial future), and Go East Young Man (that like his novels Main Street and Babbitt) show the tension between small - city capitalism and a yearning for bourgeois values of “art” and "music.”)

The stories in this collection certainly do not rank in quality with Sinclair Lewis' great novels, works for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But they clearly emanated from the same pen. Read them to become absorbed into a portrayal of a mythical past when life could be seen as simpler, and possibilities less limited. ( )

A decent collection of Sinclair Lewis' short stories, published in various magazines. None are horrible, one or two are quite good, but they reinforce the notion that Sinclair Lewis' forte was the novel. The short stories do not allow adequate room for him to develop his characters. ( )