In ARROWSMITH (Sinclair Lewis, 1925), the town doctor presents young Martin Arrowsmith, the book's protagonist, with a magnifying glass. Martin has a love for science -- for using reason to discover new empirical truths -- and the doctor's gift serves to encourage the young boy's dream of devoting himself to scientific research. As Lewis notes, however, Arrowsmith "was in no degree a hero" and often struggled to maintain his ideals in the face of other worldly temptations and complications -- namely, the financial incentive to work in the medical instead of the purely scientific field. He "regarded himself as a seeker after truth, yet ... stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass."
