The Innocents

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1917. First edition, first printing. Publisher's full grey cloth stamped in gilt. Octavo. 217. No dust jacket, lightest edge-wear, toning on spine's stamped gilt, lightly pressed bottom corners, a inscribed "#1" in pen on ffep, still a very good copy lacking only the dust jacket.

Sinclair Lewis was the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us -- not readers alone, but even writers -- are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today."

In this book Sinclair Lewis crafts a poignant narrative that explores the complexities of innocence and disillusionment within a rapidly changing American society and critiques the mediocrity and complacency that often plague American life.

This copy is confirmed as the first printing per its F-R code printed on the bottom of the copyright page.