S INCLAIR LEWIS was a novelist blessed with what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination," the capacity to see and be interested in the overriding dramatic quality of "the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world."' Lewis was often accused of being a kind of social scientist, although usually the similarity noted was in investigative and preparatory techniques and not in quality of mind. Mark Schorer for example pointed out that "with Lewis, the subject, the social section always came first; systematic research, sometimes conducted by research assistants and carrying Lewis himself into 'the field' like any cultural anthropologist, followed; the story came last, devised to carry home and usually limping under the burden of data."2 And Lewis too recognized the assumptions which underlay most of his work; he certainly was aware that his habits. of mind and method of composition resembled the habits and practices of the social scientist. Most writers, he tells us, when asked what form the first idea of a story takes, will reply that they think first of a plot, of a person, or even of a setting. But speaking of his own practice Lewis says, "Actually, these three are from the beginning mixed in your mind; you want to do a story abou.t a person who, as he becomes real to you, dwells in a definite house, street, city, class of society."3 It is, of course, this view of the individual imbedded in a matrix of neighborhood, city, and class which constitutes the basis of the sociological imagination. The power that this matrix has over the behavior of the individual is enormous. The universal recognition of this fact leads many to conclude that the human individual is completely bound up and hemmed in by his. culture. Yet somehow the human remains in-