Sinclair Lewis

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.

Cartoon

 

"Still Life" - Oil Pastel

 

RJX

The Harbor - Drawing - Oil Pastel

 

Destiny's end

 

Vincent van Gogh - A short story

Many years ago, I was disappointed with where I was as a painter, it seemed I was going nowhere, horrible days lay ahead, and I decided to give up painting altogether and do something like hiking. It was an incredible experience but most people said I was half mad to do such a thing. Unfortunately people take a dull view of hiking in my country and during those troubled times hiking seemed a risky thing to do. So I gave up hiking as a pleasant but unattainable past time.

I wondered what I could do. I wondered whether there was some theory that when applied would lead to interesting paintings. So I decided to analyze the paintings of famous artists to try to find a clue to develop my theory. For many months I tried without luck, but one day I observed the paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh seems to have been and oddity almost from the beginning. Childhood photos show him staring blankly at a distance. As a child he was serious, quiet and thoughtful. After working unsuccessfully as an art dealer he became a missionary and drifted into solitude and ill health. Perhaps in desperation he took up painting at the somewhat mature age of 27. Not only did he suffer from mental illness and poverty but he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. But what he created over the next ten years is astounding, 2100 art works including 860 paintings, which were so good that he became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

But what struck me was that most of his paintings had an element of roughness even crudeness. Take Vincent van Gogh’s “The Church at Auvers” for example, the whole building is crooked and the colors unnatural. But what would have happened if he painted it straight using natural colors, then it would be like a million other architectural drawings, competent but boring. I felt that the real secret behind a really good painting was a certain ugliness mingled cleverly with a really impressive element. The impressive element makes the painting realistic while the crudeness energizes the painting making the whole painting interesting. This was good news for me because I am one of those people in this world who is too lazy or too incompetent to draw buildings perfectly.

I do not know if my theory is correct but I used this theory to paint and came up with some eerie paintings. Of course not everyone was impressed some people called some of my buildings crude. But the important thing was for the first time in many years I felt like painting again.