Dodsworth

In the booming American Midwest of the 1920s, an innovative auto manufacturer decides to retire early at the age of fifty, having achieved the American Dream through his hard work and ingenuity. With his younger, socially ambitious wife, he embarks on a long-dreamed-of European tour-a seemingly perfect capstone to a successful life. But what begins as a leisurely vacation opens up profound questions about identity, marriage, and the nature of fulfillment. Can a self-made American businessman find meaning beyond his career? What happens when one spouse changes while the other remains static? The novel explores the clash between American practicality and European sophistication, between duty and self-discovery, and between the comfortable familiar and the alluring unknown.Published in 1929, Dodsworth emerged during a significant period in Sinclair Lewis's career, arriving four years after he won (and declined) the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith and just before he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930.The novel's resonance endured well beyond its publication, leading to successful adaptations in multiple media. Sidney Howard adapted it for the stage in 1934, and then wrote the screenplay for William Wyler's acclaimed 1936 film adaptation. The film's enduring significance was recognized in 1990 when it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.A wry, perceptive portrait of the American Dream meeting its limits abroad, as one marriage's comfortable certainties dissolve against the backdrop of the Old World.The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)