Many of Sinclair Lewis's characters make guest appearances in each other's novels. For example, Babbit and Arrowsmith have dinner together one night in Arrowsmith.

We first hear of the Dodsworths in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbit, written seven years earlier:

He had gone on, had captured the construction-company once owned by the Dodsworths, best-known pioneer family of Zenith. [Babbit, Chapter 15, Section 2]

They spoke of a "jungle dance" for which Mona Dodsworth had decorated her house with thousands of orchids. [Babbit, Chapter 15, Section 2]

There were two especially distinguished guests: the leading man of the "Bird of Paradise" company, playing this week at the Dodsworth Theater, and the mayor of Zenith, the Hon. Lucas Prout. [Babbit, Chapter 21, Section 1]

The Dodsworths show up again in Arrowsmith (1925):

In the slightly midwestern town of Zenith, the appearance of a play "with the original New York cast" was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theater was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. . . . Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics. [Arrowsmith, Chapter 7, Section 6]

A relaxed, garrulous Samuel Dodsworth is living in retirement in Italy in Chapter 5 of Sinclair Lewis's last novel, the posthumous World So Wide (1951). He seems unscarred by his experiences in the present novel, but has no inner life.

Chapter 11 of Ann Vickers (1932) has a throw-away reference to the Dodsworths.