Sentimental Yearner

This is one of nine drawings Grant Wood produced for the deluxe illustrated edition of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920, 1937). While Lewis was harshly satiric in his portrayal of the residents of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, Wood interpreted them good-naturedly, drawing on his own experience of the types he knew in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he lived. Wood’s model for the sappy Sentimental Yearner in this drawing was his friend Charles Sanders, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa. Wood conceived of the character as a painfully earnest fop. He’s so sensitive, he can be transported by a tiny carnation, a detail of Wood’s own devising. Though the character is dressed like a diplomat, his ensemble, including the comically dainty bow tie, may well have come from the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue, a favorite resource of Wood’s.