Arrowsmith

Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith is a novel about science, ambition, and the institutions that corrupt both. Through Martin Arrowsmith's struggle to preserve intellectual honesty amid vanity, money, careerism, and public pressure, Lewis asks whether truth can survive once research becomes entangled with prestige and power.

It is not simply a satire of medicine or a celebration of scientific idealism, but a study of the moral fragility of modern expertise, and of the cost exacted by any system that rewards influence more readily than rigor.

This Heritage Canon Philosophical Edition includes a new introduction by Daniel Shilansky, who brings Lewis's novel into conversation with the crisis of scientific authority. Reading Arrowsmith against both populist distrust and corporate capture, he shows why figures like RFK Jr. and the world of Big Pharma are not opposites but distorted reflections of the same temptation: the urge to subordinate truth to power, image, and control.

The result is an edition that reveals Arrowsmith as a novel about the moral fate of science in modern life.