the inocents by Sinclair Lewis was one of two novels published in 1917. The full title of this work is The Innocents: A Story for Lovers and was originally a collection of serialized stories for a women’s magazine. It was Sinclair Lewis’s last distinctive pulp novel.
The Innocents, Plot Summary:
The first characters introduced are a couple, born a decade before the American Civil War, who now live in New York City and have been married for 40 years. They are Mr. Seth Appleby and Mrs. Sarah Jane Appleby, often called simply ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’.
They have a married daughter, Lulu, who lives with her husband and young son in a New York town. Mother and father are “the innocents” from the 1917 serialized novella by Sinclair Lewis.
After a few decades at Pilkings & Son’s Shoe Parlour, Seth Appleby has worked his way up to become a more or less modern equivalent to Mr. Pilkings of what Dagwood Bumstead is to Julius Dithers, albeit even less appreciated and questioned than Dagwood. This is a theme that also appeared on “Our Mr. Wrenn”.
During their annual two-week vacation on Cape Cod, the father and mother invite the owners of their vacation home for a snack at Ye Tea Shoppe. Expecting the bill for his light snack to be around ninety cents, the father is surprised to see that he is charged $3.60. He calculates that this sum represents a 500% profit margin on the food served.
Suddenly, at one point like a big, eye-opening eye-opening moment, the idea of running a tea shop seems like an attractive alternative to outfitting big-city fans with footwear.
They sell everything they have and open their own tea shop on Cape Cod. It fails. Seth can’t get his old job back. They end up having to wander from New York to West Virginia, where they transform the manners and morals of a jungle of drifters. The vagabonds scatter and the legend of two eccentric rich old men wandering the world doing good begins. In the end, the Applebys find happiness in the shoe business in a small town in Indiana.
If this sounds like a bit of fluff, Lewis probably wouldn’t argue. He had an uncanny ability to make a living as a writer because he knew how to quickly provide “fluff” stories that ordinary audiences would consume.
Sinclair Lewis often had a hard time describing married couples who were equal to each other or at least brought something close to equal as partners in their “divisions of labor.” The Innocents is a very notable exception to this, as for any plot flaws, this novel is one of your best examples of a couple as equals.
Whether you call it travel, flight, wanderlust, dreaming… call it “greener grass syndrome,” but one of the most persistent themes in both Sinclair Lewis’s personal life and his work is that sheer movement, pure try something completely new. and differently, simply going the long way, some or all of these, will almost certainly bring good results, something better.
Now a rare collectible book, a good copy without a dust jacket can easily sell for around $800.
