Arrowsmith: Genesis, Development, Versions

Abstract

S INCLAIR LEWIS wrote into Arrowsmith so much of his basic personality that the novel is central to the revelation of the man and his work. Fortunately there is much material at hand pertaining to the genesis of the book; and the opportunity to trace the development of the characters and especially to note a multitude of editorial revisions and the reconstitution of sectional terminations was greatly expanded when, the midst of his work, Lewis revised the still uncompleted book-manuscript for initial publication as a serial the Designer and the Woman's Magazine from June, I924, through April, 1925. The editors of the Designer also excised a great many passages throughout the manuscript; thus a study of editorial policy may easily be made. Both Lewis and Paul Henry de Kruif have written of the dramatic origin of Arrowsmith.' They had first met the summer of 1922 in the office of Dr. Morris Fishbein, of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and that evening, during an ardent discussion on medical education, Lewis declared his resolution to write a story of a doctor who, starting out as a competent general practitioner, emerges as a real scientist, despising ordinary 'success.' Dr. de Kruif, bacteriologist, fresh from the laboratories of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, agreed to help him. Together they wandered from Barbados to Panama to Europe;... spent hours laboratories Panama, London, Paris, and got five to seven hours of work daily. Lewis typed, with maps, books, diagrams and paper around him, including Patriclk Manson's Tropical Diseases; de Kruif instructed him on medical and scientific matters, microbes, and the lore of laboratories.