Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the third son of a country doctor. A lonely, awkward boy and an omnivorous reader, he went east to Yale, interrupting his studies to work at Upton Sinclair’s cooperative colony in New Jersey and to travel to Panama before graduating in 1908. Years of journalism, publishing jobs and magazine fiction followed; he even sold story plots to Jack London.

Main Street (1920), a portrait of a restless young woman stifled by a small Midwestern town, made him famous almost overnight. Babbitt (1922) did the same for the booster businessman of the American city, and its title entered the language as shorthand for conformist self-satisfaction. In Arrowsmith (1925) he followed a doctor’s struggle for scientific integrity, declining the Pulitzer Prize it won; Elmer Gantry (1927) took aim at a hypocritical evangelist, and Dodsworth (1929) at a car manufacturer adrift in Europe. Lewis wrote with a reporter’s ear for American speech and a caricaturist’s eye, yet many readers recognised themselves in his figures.

In 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his Nobel lecture he praised Dreiser, Cather and Hemingway while lamenting that Americans were still afraid of any literature that did not glorify their country. It Can’t Happen Here (1935) imagined a fascist takeover of the United States. His later books were less admired, and he struggled for years with alcoholism. He died in Rome in 1951.