The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen

by Sinclair Lewis

A collection of works from the Nobel prize winning novelist. Contents: The Man Who Knew Coolidge; The Story by Mack McMack; You Know How Women Are; You Know How Relatives Are; Travel is So Broadening; and The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship.

Genres: Fiction

275 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Novelist Harry Sinclair Lewis satirized middle-class America in his 22 works, including Babbitt (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927) and first received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930.

Middle-class values and materialism attach unthinking George F. Babbitt, the narrow-minded, self-satisfied main character person in the novel of Sinclair Lewis.

People awarded "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

He knowingly, insightfully, and critically viewed capitalism and materialism between the wars. People respect his strong characterizations of modern women.

Henry Louis Mencken wrote, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade...it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclai...

Reviews

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This somewhat overlooked book has everything I love about Sinclair Lewis. Six great satirical stories told in Lewis's dry humor that often bordered on absolute hilarity. Each story is narrated by a traveling salesman named Lowell Schmaltz who is a complete motor mouth. The entire book is told in dialog in which Lowell rambles on and on. The first two stories were my favorites. The first, "The Man Who Knew Coolidge", Lowell brags about knowing Coolidge, who he attended a couple of classes with in college but really barely talked to and the second story, "The Story by Mack McMack" he consistently began stories but lost track of what he was saying and drifted into another tale without completing the first and then he ended the story with a joke that he forgot the punchline to. A very enjoyable read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Lewis trying to mix genres: a sort of mash-up of Saturday Evening Post fiction with his more satirical portraits of the Middlewestern middle class. Most of the stories are shaggy dog tales, wandering off indeterminately, making the book feel rudderless, but the exquisitely precise ear for monologue that makes Babbitt and Elmer Gantry so dynamic and propulsive is also here in abundance. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone but a diehard Lewis fan (or a grad student writing about him), but I think that its reputation as a total disaster (according to Lewis's biographers and numerous critics) is a lazy exaggeration.

[Donald Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

While certainly not the best of the 1920s writings of Lewis, this book ventures new waters of creativity for Lewis and also integrates much of the world and inhabitants of the city of "Zenith" in the Midwestern state of "Winnemac". The nods to Babbitt and Gantry are also quite thorough by comparison with later works such as Gideon Planish (also "good" in itself but not great like his strongest works). I'd definitely recommend it to Lewis fans...but it would not be an entry text by any means. It should be given a better name for it does excel in creativity, humor, and furthering the world of Lewis's "Zenith".

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm continuing my tradition of loving the lesser-known and underappreciated books from Lewis more than his famous works. This novel – really a loose connection of six short stories – is a brilliant satirical send-up of the loud, baffoonish, hypocritical Everyman from the American midwest who thinks the world revolves around consumerism, Kiwanis Club luncheons, middle class materialism, cars, “Americanizing” the nation, funny magazine advertisements, and the conservative politics of Calvin Coolidge. The rambling, first-person tales in the voice of this character, the hapless Lowell Schmaltz, are reminiscent of the best of Ring Lardner and Dorothy Parker, as Lewis’ razor sharp humor carves up the concept of American exceptionalism on every page.

Lowell is an admirer of Elmer Gantry and a friend of George Babbitt but ironically claims to be quite different from George, even though both are cookie-cutter midwesterners: Low drives a Chrysler, Babbitt doesn’t; Low prefers fishing, Babbitt golfs; Low sells office supplies, Babbitt sells real estate; etc. Like Gantry, he hypocritically denounces smoking, drinking, and womanizing while partaking of all at every chance. He’s just a regular joe – but he knew Coolidge in college (well, maybe it was another guy named “Cal” …), and if you have the unfortunate luck to sit across from him on a train, he will tell you all about it for a few hours.

The final chapter – a lecture given in front of his church, including a special guest, the esteemed Dr. Elmer Gantry – gives the principles by which he lives as an American Christian businessman: service and practicalness, both of which require an inauthentic chumminess on the part of the salesman to push inferior products at higher prices under the guise of befriending the customer. It’s the same “family business” model based on “Christian charity” with a fake smile and a “call the customer by the first name” mentality that drives local business transactions in the US to this day. This final chapter might be one of Lewis’ sharpest, and it’s buried in this mostly forgotten novel.

I guess some might call this novel mean-spirited – a charge often leveled at Lewis – but this is really pure catharsis for those of us Americans who still live with guys like this in our communities. (I’ll give you one guess which national political figure the contemporary version of Lowell Schmaltz would fervently support …) Sometimes I think Lewis has more to impart about being American in this era than many contemporary American writers, and certainly more than many of Lewis’ own generation who are currently held in higher regard in the canon.

This would make a great comic supplementary reading to either Babbitt or Main Street. I prefer this book to both, but only because I think Lewis is at his best when he’s viciously turning the comic screws.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is essentially a monologue drawn out over six episodes. Through the character of Lowell Schmaltz, Sinclair Lewis, casts his familiar analytical eye on his contemporary American culture. He displays flourishes of his trademark wit and satire and is not afraid to make reference to one of his most famous characters—Elmer Gantry—in the book.

Schmaltz is a fast-talking office supplies salesman who literally does not let anyone get a word in edgewise. This becomes tired after a while, although I appreciated Lewis’s caricature of the stereotypical American—one who is not familiar with history—Schmaltz thinks Roger Baldwin founded Rhode Island and that Gorky was a famous novelist in Hungary. Leéis also skewers American nationalism and xenophobia through Schmaltz’s work in the Americanization Committee of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce.

In the last chapter, “The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship” Lewis puts up to full view of the reader the hypocrisy of the idealized firm of American sense of self: superiority and oversimplification. At one point he writes something that proved to be prescient of where we are now: “At last has come the glorious era when every noble sentiment, every artistic turn of phrase and elegant wording, every instinct of beauty, is no longer forced to run alone and maverick, but can rejoicingly take its proper place in serving commerce and the merchant kings.”

This is not one of Sinclair Lewis’s best works and for me the monologue format became grating not longer after the first chapter. I would recommend this only to hard core fans of the author.

[Don LePan · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting but ultimately failed experiment. The first 10 or 20 pages are highly engaging; Lewis adopts the voice of a puffed-up small-city businessman, and gets it pretty well right, though he occasionally exaggerates for satiric effect. As do many such people, this character is always interrupting himself and going off on tangents, and that's fine for 10 or 20 pages. The problem is that the whole book is written in this voice--it's just way too much. Just as we would get very bored if we were listening to a blowhard like this go on and on in a social context, so too we become very bored by him going on at endless length in these pages. What could have been quite a good single short story becomes a real chore to read. (Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt provides a far deeper and more interesting look at similar material.)

[Kiof · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the closest thing to a Midwestern Bernhard we’ll ever get. I wish Lewis would have written more books like this one, freed from the constraints of scene setting, and further developed the hysterical monologue of irrelevant American heart.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I thought it would be. It reminded me of Ring Lardner's "You Know Me, Al."

Not a "story", but the first-person ramblings of Lowell Schmaltz.

[Sean11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not as ambitious as Lewis's five classic novels of the 1920s, "The Man Who Knew Coolidge" is still a wonderful, short read. The humor and satire is present on every page - and Lowell Schmaltz is simply a great companion to George F. Babbitt and Sam Dodsworth. So, if you liked those characters, you'll find this book a delight. I enjoyed the model of Schmaltz's rambling speeches in different locales; it's surprising as a narrative form, and one has to figure out with whom he's chatting with in each chapter, but it becomes clear. You can get absorbed in Lowell's endless commentary on the times Of Lewis's two obscure novels from the 1920s, I much preferred "The Man Who Knew Coolidge" over "Mantrap" - for the humor alone.

[Troy Soos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly amusing, but essentially just a shaggy dog story.