World So Wide

By Sinclair Lewis

Book Overview

Can a man recover youth by changing countries, habits and ideas? After an automobile accident and his wife's death unsettle his established life, thirty-five-year-old architect Hayden Chart adopts a 'Doctrine of Recovered Youth', exchanging professional and domestic routine for travel, study and the uncertain work of reconsidering who he is. Florence becomes the principal ground for this satirical transatlantic novel, where architecture, art and European history sharpen its cultural comparisons. Among expatriates, scholars and journalists, Hayden encounters a society as practised in performance as the provincial world he has left behind. His developing relationships with scholar Olivia Lomond and others bring questions of romance, authority and gender roles into a wider examination of how people present themselves, and how readily cosmopolitan manners can become another form of convention. Beneath the movement of a travel narrative lies a sustained enquiry into work and leisure, authenticity and social display, grief and the possibility of beginning again in middle age. Hayden's architectural perspective gives particular force to a story concerned with structures both visible and social: the forms people inhabit, the histories they study and the identities they attempt to rebuild. Satirical without abandoning its serious questions, the novel tests American and European assumptions against one another while keeping personal reinvention under close scrutiny. This book was out of print for decades and is now republished by Alpha Editions. It has been restored for today's and future generations. This edition is not just a reprint - it's a collector's item and a cultural treasure.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9378415547
• ISBN13: 9789378415548
• Release Date: February 2027
• Publisher: Alpha Edition
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"