Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man

Our Mr. Wrenn introduces one of literature's most endearing losers: a middle-aged clerk at a novelty company who has spent years gazing at travel posters and imagining himself in lands he'll never visit. Mr. Wrenn lives a life of exquisite quiet desperation, working a tedious job, returning to a boarding house where even the landlady barely notices him, finding his only escape in movie theaters and daydreamed adventures. When a modest inheritance finally offers him the chance to see the world, he must confront whether a man who has only ever dreamed of courage can actually find it. Sinclair Lewis, before he became the Nobel-winning satirist of Main Street and Babbitt, wrote something gentler and more poignant: a comedy of a man too timid to live and too romantic to stop hoping. The novel anticipates everything Lewis would later perfect - his eye for the hollow ambitions of ordinary Americans, his sympathy for those who fail to achieve their own grander selves.