How long is it?
440 pages in the Signet Classics 1998 mass market paperback edition.
Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Science
Arrowsmith
CanonicalPulitzer Prize for Novel (pre-1948), 1926Reading facts
✓ Checked- Reading effort
- 53 / 100Moderate
- Length
- 440 pagesSignet Classics · 1998
- Reading time
- 8 h 45 minat 50 pages an hour ·
- Pace
- Moderate
- Emotional intensity
- 4 / 5
About 8 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 18 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
Martin Arrowsmith leaves a small Midwestern town to study medicine, torn between treating patients and the exacting laboratory research taught by his mentor, Max Gottlieb. Alongside nursing student Leora Tozer, who becomes his partner, he pursues a career through rural practice, public health and a New York research institute, repeatedly encountering demands for profit and publicity that conflict with sound science.
Reader notes
The episodic social satire follows Martin from job to job, spending considerable time on the daily work of medicine and research. Its concern with professional ambition and institutional hypocrisy runs alongside a serious argument about what doctors owe their patients and what scientists owe the truth.
How it reads
- Writing style
- Descriptive · Direct · Essayistic · Witty
- Tone
- Cerebral · Earnest · Irreverent · Satirical
- Structure
- Episodic · Linear
- Driven by
- Character · Ideas
- Point of view
- Third person, omniscient
- Setting
- American Midwest · Caribbean · New York
Reading complexity
- Writing
- 3 / 5
- Ideas
- 4 / 5
- Structure
- 3 / 5
- Background knowledge
- 2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
- Writing
- How much attention the sentences and language require.
- Ideas
- How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
- Structure
- How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
- Background knowledge
- Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
- Emotional intensity
- Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
- Ambition
- Inequality
- Knowledge and truth
- Morality
- Power
- Work
Content notes
- Violence
- Mild
- Sexual content
- Mild
- Swearing
- Mild
- Substance use
- Strong
- Abuse
- None
- Self-harm or suicide
- Mild
Standing and awards
Canonical
- Pulitzer Prize for Novel (pre-1948), 1926
- Library of America
- Author: Nobel Prize in Literature, 1930
Questions readers ask
Which edition is shown here?
Signet Classics · 1998 · Mass Market Paperback. ISBN 9780451526915.
How long does it take to read Arrowsmith?
About 8 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 440-page Signet Classics edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who made social satire from the pressures of ordinary American life. His fiction moves across small-town culture, urban business, medicine, and national politics, but its method remains character-centered: he places recognizable people inside institutions that reward conformity, then shows how slogans, status, and professional ambition shape their choices. Main Street tests reforming hopes against a community’s complacency, while George Babbitt’s practiced boosterism exposes the moral evasions of commercial success. In Arrowsmith, Lewis turns the same scrutiny on scientific ideals compromised by prestige and institutional politics. He also gave unusual weight to women resisting approved social roles. His criticism of capitalism and materialism could be comic, descriptive, and sharply observed; in It Can't Happen Here, it broadens into a warning about fear, populist spectacle, and the dismantling of civil liberties. Lewis’s range is united by an interest in how public language becomes private belief.
If you liked this
Edition and details
- Publisher
- Signet Classics
- Publication year
- 1998
- Format
- Mass Market Paperback
- Pages
- 440
- ISBN
- 9780451526915
- Edition language
- English
- Original language
- English
- First published
- 1925
- Genres and form
- Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Science · Health & Medicine · Literary fiction · Social novel · Picaresque · Satire
- Editions
- 15
- Languages
- 4 (Czech, German, English, French)
The catalog does not yet include a matching edition. Details may differ between editions.