Trail of the Hawk: a Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

Before Sinclair Lewis became the voice of Main Street, before he won the Nobel Prize, he wrote this raucous, restless novel about a young man who refuses to stay one person. Carl Ericson, the Hawk, son of Norwegian immigrants, bursts out of his small town and into aAmerica itself, trying on lives like costumes: hobo, Bowery bartender, Panama engineer, barnstorming aviator. Along the way, he runs from the girl who loves him, the friend who judges him, and the philosopher who sees through him. Lewis called it "a Comedy of the Seriousness of Life" and that's precisely what it is - a sharp, affectionate portrait of a young man who takes everything so terribly seriously, who mistakes motion for meaning, who believes the next adventure will finally be the one that matters. It is early Lewis at his most energetic, before his satire curdled into polemic, here still capable of laughing at his creations while rooting for them anyway. For anyone who has ever fled something familiar in search of something undefined.