Mantrap

Mantrap is Sinclair Lewis’s novel of an effete Eastern lawyer’s trip into the wilderness where he competes for the affection of the beautiful but bored city wife of a more competent backwoodsman. Scholars studying gender roles in the 1920’s have been interested in this book for what it says about the society’s conflicting values for men of brawn and brain. Humorously, some critics find significance in the title not knowing that Lewis and his brother Claude actually had an adventure on a river in Canada named Mantrap.