Books: Novelist as Critic

THE MAN FROM MAIN STREET (371 pp.) —Edited by Harry Maule and Melville Cane—Random House ($3.75).

Like a good many other U.S. novelists who get a kick out of posing as intellectual primitives, Sinclair Lewis was much more of a literary fellow than he let on. Between novels he wrote almost a million words of essays, sketches and reviews. In The Man from Main Street, two of Lewis' associates have combed together a miscellany of his nonfiction which contains its full quota of transient fluff but also proves that Lewis had a lively if...