Ann Vickers by Sinclair Lewis

This year is actually the 75th anniversary of a Sinclair Lewis novel that is all but forgotten now, but was one of his most popular books at the time (among both readers and critics), and was a strongly political novel aimed at feminist rights in America.

That pro feminist work that caused such a stir was Ann Vickers.

"Ann Vickers" was first published Jan. 25, 1933, and like many of the later works of Lewis, this novel has a very political and soceital message that came across to some as being almost like a collection of societal sermons.

This novel follows Ann Vickers, the protagonist of the novel, from a young age until late middle age. While she faces all the common issues of women of the time, she is also used to shed light on other perceived evils of society that Lewis fought.

Ann goes to college, where among many lessons about chaunvanism, she also receives homosexual advances, a subject that certainly lit plenty of fires in the 1930s. After graduation, she works for the suffrage movement, then gets involved with social work, then prison reform.

Lewis makes Ann Vickers a very complicated character, which makes her all the more intriguing in a work that was very political.

Ann is feminist, but she's not passionate about it because of her disgust for many others actually in the feminist movement. In addition, Ann's personal life involves affairs, marriage, divorce, and an illegitimate child, but doesn't celebrate either side of any of these issues, instead offering the simple platitlude that for better or worse (and often times in this work, it was for the worst), women should be allowed to simply choose their own fates, just like men.

This novel showed an evolution in Sinclair Lewis's writing style, one that was probably the result of changes in his own personal beliefs as he got older. This novel also helped revive his literary standing, which at the time was being questioned by many critics.

Ann Vickers was inspired by several strong women, but most of all by his secon wife, Dorothy Thompson, who was a renowned feminist and strongly independent.