Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925, and it’s one of his most ambitious and complex works. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year (though Lewis famously declined the award), and it stands as a biting critique of American society, particularly the fields of medicine, science, and the moral challenges that come with them. The novel follows the life of Martin Arrowsmith, a young and idealistic doctor who embarks on a journey to make meaningful contributions to science and medicine. At the start, Martin is enthusiastic about the potential for scientific discovery to improve the world, but he quickly learns that the medical and scientific fields are rife with compromises, egos, politics, and moral ambiguity.