[Gutenberg 26732] • Free Air

Fame was just around the corner when Sinclair Lewis published *Free Air* in 1919, a year before *Main Street*. The latter novel zeroed in on the town of Gopher Prairie; the former stopped there briefly and then took the reader by automobile in search of America. *Free Air* heads toward a West that was brimming with possibilities for suddenly mobile Americans at the end of a world war.The vehicle in Lewis’s novel, not a Model T but a Gomez-Dep roadster, takes Claire Boltwood and her father from Minnesota to Seattle, exposing them all to the perils of early motoring. On the road, the upper-crust Boltwoods are at once more insignificant and more noble. The greatest distance to be overcome is the social one between Claire and a young mechanic named Milt, who, with a cat as his traveling companion, follows close behind. If *Free Air* anticipates many of the themes of Lewis’s later novels, it also looks forward to a genre that includes John Steinbeck’s *Travels with Charley and Josh Greenfeld* and Paul Mazursky’s *Harry and Tonto*. And the character of Claire, blazing her own trail across the West, looks back to the nineteenth-century pioneer woman and ahead to the independent-minded movie heroines played by Katherine Hepburn.

In his introduction Robert E. Fleming discusses the place of this early novel in Lewis’s canon.