Sinclair Lewis was an American author. In 1930 Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for "Arrowsmith", but declined it because he believed the standard for Pulitzer novel awards was too restrictive.
Lewis' novels often satirize stupidity, mediocrity, commercialism or bigotry in some phase of American life. "Main Street" (1920), his fourth novel but his first success, is about the intellectual and cultural poverty in a small midwestern town. The principle character in "Babbitt" (1922) is a businessman who is a typical "go-getter." The preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1927) is more interested in building a successful career than in saving souls. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. While at Yale University he edited the college literary magazine. He interrupted his studies to work as a janitor in Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in Englewood, New Jersey. Later Lewis made a trip to Panama to look for work on the canal then being dug. In 1907 he returned to Yale to be graduated with a A.B. degree.
Lewis worked in a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa, for a time. He spent six months in Carmel, California, with William Rose Bennet, trying free-lance writing but with little success. In 1910 he again went East. In Washington, he was editor of a magazine for teachers of the deaf, and in New York he became editor of a publishing house. He was married to Grace Hegger in 1914. While commuting to and from his Long Island home, Lewis wrote the greater part of "Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) and "The Trail of the Hawk (1915). Neither novel was successful, but in the meantime, Lewis was selling short stories to magazines. In 1916 he quit the publishing house to devote full time to writing.
In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the United States to receive the award. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us - not readers alone, but even writers - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of faults as well as virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today. He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.
In summarising Lewis's career, Shirer concludes:
It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to...Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner...Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life...was greater than all the other four writers together.
