Harry Sinclair Lewis (/ ̍ l uː ɪ s / ; February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an

American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the

United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and

graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

His works are known for their insightful and critical views of

American capitalism and materialism between the wars.[1] He is also respected for his strong

characterizations of modern working women. H.L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a

novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the

Minnesota wilds."[2]

He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a Great Americans series postage stamp.

Childhood and education[edit]

Born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis began reading

books at a young age and kept a diary. He had two siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born

1878). His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty

relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891.

The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently

enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken

with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local

girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy

in the Spanish-American War.[3]

In late 1902 Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department

of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance by Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a

religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. He entered

Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work

at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey,

and to travel toPanama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and seemingly

self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He

did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom

recognized his promise as a writer.[4]

§Early career[edit]

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in

the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation

Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction

for publication and to chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing

houses (and for a time at theCarmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony), he developed a

facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He

also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished

novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that

appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man,

appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915)

and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler,The Innocents:

A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's

Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

§Marriage and family[edit]

In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887-1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They

had one son, Wells Lewis (1917–1944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Wells Lewis was

killed in action while serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, specifically during the rescue of

'The Lost Battalion' in the Forêt de Champ, near Germany, in France.[citation needed] Dean Acheson, the

future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and observed that

Sinclair's literary "success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for

Lewis's work" and the family moved out of town.[5]

Lewis divorced Grace in 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political

newspaper columnist. Later in 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont.[6] They had a son, Michael Lewis, in 1930. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they

divorced in 1942. Michael Lewis became an actor, also suffered with alcoholism, and died in

1975 of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Michael had two sons, John Paul and Gregiry Claude, with wife

Bernadette Nanse and a daughter Lesley with wife Valerie Cardew.

§Commercial success[edit]

Upon moving to Washington, D.C., Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, he began

taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-

1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920.[7] As his

biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success ofMain Street "was the most

sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history."[8] Lewis's agent had the most

optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies. In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000

copies,[9] and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million.[10] According to biographer

Richard Lingeman, "Main Street made [Lewis] rich—earning him perhaps three million current

[2005] dollars".[11]

Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American

commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith,

Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis would return in future novels, includingGideon

Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about the challenges

faced by an idealistic doctor. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis refused).[12] Adapted

as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman, it was nominated

for four Academy Awards.

Next Lewis published Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted an evangelical minister as deeply

hypocritical. The novel was denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S.

cities. Adapted for the screen more than a generation later, the novel was the basis of the 1960

movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and

successful members of American society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless

lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. The book was adapted for the Broadwaystage in

1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film version. Directed

by William Wyler and a great success at the time, the film is still highly regarded. In 1990, it was

selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and in 2005 Time magazine

named it one of the "100 Best Movies" of the past 80 years.[13]

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Lewis wrote many short stories for a variety of magazines and

publications. "Little Bear Bongo" (1930), a tale about a bear cub who wanted to escape the circus

in search of a better life in the real world, was published in Cosmopolitan magazine.[14] The story

was acquired by Walt Disney Pictures in 1940 for a possible feature film. World War II

sidetracked those plans until 1947. Disney used the story (now titled "Bongo") as part of its

feature Fun and Fancy Free.

§Nobel Prize[edit]

In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive

the award. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt.

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 our faults as well as our 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."[15]

§Later years[edit]

After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis wrote eleven more novels, ten of which appeared in his

lifetime. The best remembered is It Can't Happen Here (1935), a novel about the election of

a fascist to the American presidency.

After an alcoholic binge in 1937, Lewis checked into the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric

hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for treatment. His doctors gave Lewis a blunt

assessment that he needed to decide "whether he was going to live without alcohol or die by it,

one or the other."[16] Lewis checked out after ten days, lacking, one of his physicians wrote to a

colleague, any "fundamental understanding of his problem."[16]

In the 1940s, Lewis and rabbi-turned-popular author Lewis Browne frequently appeared on the

lecture platform together,[17] touring the United States and debating such questions as "Has the

Modern Woman Made Good?", "The Country Versus the City", "Is the Machine Age Wrecking

Civilization?" and "Can Fascism Happen Here?" before audiences of as many as 3,000 people.

The pair was described as "the Gallagher and Shean of the lecture circuit" by Lewis biographer

Richard Lingeman.[18]

The novel Kingsblood Royal (1947) is set in the fictional city Grand Republic, Minnesota, an

enlarged and updated version of Zenith. Based on the Sweet Trials in Detroit, in which

an African-American doctor was denied the chance to purchase a house in a "white" section of

the city, Kingsblood Royal was a powerful and very early contribution to the civil rights movement.

Lewis died in Rome on January 10, 1951, aged 65, from advanced alcoholism. His cremated

remains were buried in Sauk Centre. A final novel, World So Wide (1951), was published

posthumously.

William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism per

se. 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, and perhaps could not, stop; he died when his heart stopped. [19]

In summing up Lewis' 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, andFaulkner ... Lewis lacked style.

Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together. [19]

§Works[edit]

§Novels[edit]

1912: Hike and the Aeroplane (juvenile, as Tom Graham)

1914: Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man

1915: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

1917: The Job: An American Novel

1917: The Innocents: A Story for Lovers

1919: Free Air

Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, June 7, June 14 and June 21, 1919

1920: Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott

1922: Babbitt

Excerpted in Hearst's International, October 1922

1925: Arrowsmith

1926: Mantrap

Serialized in Collier's, February 20, March 20 and April 24, 1926

1927: Elmer Gantry

1928: The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and

Nordic Citizen

1929: Dodsworth

1933: Ann Vickers

Serialized in Redbook, August, November and December 1932

1934: Work of Art

1935: It Can't Happen Here

1938: The Prodigal Parents

1940: Bethel Merriday

1943: Gideon Planish

1945: Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives

Appeared in Cosmopolitan, July 1945.

1947: Kingsblood Royal

1949: The God-Seeker

1951: World So Wide (posthumous)

§Short stories[edit]

1907: "That Passage in Isaiah", The Blue Mule, May 1907

1907: "Art and the Woman", The Gray Goose, June 1907

1911: "The Way to Rome", The Bellman, May 13, 1911

1915: "Commutation: $9.17", The Saturday Evening Post, October 30, 1915

1915: "The Other Side of the House", The Saturday Evening Post, November 27, 1915

1916: "If I Were Boss", The Saturday Evening Post, January 1 and 8, 1916

1916: "I'm a Stranger Here Myself", The Smart Set, August 1916

1916: "He Loved His Country", Everybody's Magazine, October 1916

1916: "Honestly If Possible", The Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 191

1917: "Twenty-Four Hours in June", The Saturday Evening Post, February 17, 1917

1917: "The Innocents", Woman's Home Companion, March 1917

1917: "A Story with a Happy Ending", The Saturday Evening Post, March 17, 1917

1917: "Hobohemia", The Saturday Evening Post, April 7, 1917

1917: "The Ghost Patrol", The Red Book Magazine, June 1917

Adapted for the silent film The Ghost Patrol (1923)

1917: "Young Man Axelbrod", The Century, June 1917

1917: "A Woman by Candlelight", The Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1917

1917: "The Whisperer", The Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1917

1917: "The Hidden People", Good Housekeeping, September 1917

1917: "Joy-Joy", The Saturday Evening Post, October 20, 1917

1918: "A Rose for Little Eva", McClure's, February 1918

1918: "Slip It to ’Em", Metropolitan Magazine, March 1918

1918: "An Invitation to Tea", Every Week, June 1, 1918

1918: "The Shadowy Glass", The Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1918

1918: "The Willow Walk", The Saturday Evening Post, August 10, 1918

1918: "Getting His Bit", Metropolitan Magazine, September 1918

1918: "The Swept Hearth", The Saturday Evening Post, September 21, 1918

1918: "Jazz", Metropolitan Magazine, October 1918

1918: "Gladvertising", The Popular Magazine, October 7, 1918

1919: "Moths in the Arc Light", The Saturday Evening Post, January 11, 1919

1919: "The Shrinking Violet", The Saturday Evening Post, February 15, 1919

1919: "Things", The Saturday Evening Post, February 22, 1919

1919: "The Cat of the Stars", The Saturday Evening Post, April 19, 1919

1919: "The Watcher Across the Road", The Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1919

1919: "Speed", The Red Book Magazine, June 1919

1919: "The Shrimp-Colored Blouse", The Red Book Magazine, August 1919

1919: "The Enchanted Hour", The Saturday Evening Post, August 9, 1919

1919: "Danger — Run Slow", The Saturday Evening Post, October 18 and 25, 1919

1919: "Bronze Bars", The Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1919

1920: "Habaes Corpus", The Saturday Evening Post, January 24, 1920

1920: "Way I See It", The Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1920

1920: "The Good Sport", The Saturday Evening Post, December 11, 1920

1921: "A Matter of Business", Harper’s, March 1921

1921: "Number Seven to Sagapoose", The American Magazine, May 1921

1921: "The Post-Mortem Murder", The Century, May 1921

1923: "The Hack Driver", The Nation, August 29, 1923

1929: "He Had a Brother", Cosmopolitan, May 1929

1929: "There Was a Prince", Cosmopolitan, June 1929

1929: "Elizabeth, Kitty and Jane", Cosmopolitan, July 1929

1929: "Dear Editor", Cosmopolitan, August 1929

1929: "What a Man!", Cosmopolitan, September 1929

1929: "Keep Out of the Kitchen", Cosmopolitan, October 1929

1929: "A Letter from the Queen", Cosmopolitan, December 1929

1930: "Youth", Cosmopolitan, February 1930

1930: "Noble Experiment", Cosmopolitan, August 1930

1930: "Little Bear Bongo", Cosmopolitan, September 1930

Adapted for the animated feature film Fun and Fancy Free (1947)

1930: "Go East, Young Man", Cosmopolitan, December 1930

1931: "Let’s Play King", Cosmopolitan, January, February and March 1931

1931: "Pajamas", Redbook, April 1931

1931: "Ring Around a Rosy", The Saturday Evening Post, June 6, 1931

1931: "City of Mercy", Cosmopolitan, July 1931

1931: "Land", The Saturday Evening Post, September 12, 1931

1931: "Dollar Chasers", The Saturday Evening Post, October 17 and 24, 1931

1935: "The Hippocratic Oath", Cosmopolitan, June 1935

1935: "Proper Gander", The Saturday Evening Post, July 13, 1935

1935: "Onward, Sons of Ingersoll!", Scribner’s, August 1935

1936: "From the Queen", Argosy, February 1936

1941: "The Man Who Cheated Time", Good Housekeeping, March 1941

1941: "Manhattan Madness", The American Magazine, September 1941

1941: "They Had Magic Then!", Liberty, September 6, 1941

1943: "All Wives Are Angels", Cosmopolitan, February 1943

1943: "Nobody to Write About", Cosmopolitan, July 1943

1943: "Harri", Good Housekeeping, September 1943

1943: "Green Eyes—A Handbook of Jealousy", Cosmopolitan, September and October 1943

§The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949)[edit]

Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set

published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press. The work is the first attempt to collect all of Lewis's

short stories.[20]

Volume 1 (June 1904–January 1916) ISBN 9780773454873

Volume 2 (August 1916–October 1917) ISBN 9780773454897

Volume 3 (January 1918–February 1919) ISBN 9780773454910

Volume 4 (February 1919–May 1921) ISBN 9780773454194

Volume 5 (August 1923–April 1931) ISBN 9780773453562

Volume 6 (June 1931–March 1941) ISBN 9780773453067

Volume 7 (September 1941–May 1949) ISBN 9780773452763

§Articles[edit]

1915: "Nature, Inc.", The Saturday Evening Post, October 2, 1915

1917: "For the Zelda Bunch", McClure's, October 1917

1918: "Spiritualist Vaudeville", Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Gasoline Gypsies", The Saturday Evening Post,

December 20, 1919

1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Want a Lift?", The Saturday Evening Post, December

27, 1919

1920: "Adventures in Autobumming: The Great American Frying Pan", The Saturday Evening

Post, January 3, 1920

§Plays[edit]

1919: Hobohemia

1934: Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts (with Lloyd Lewis)

1936: It Can't Happen Here (with John C. Moffitt)

1938: Angela Is Twenty-Two (with Fay Wray)

Adapted for the feature film This Is the Life (1944)

§Poems[edit]

1907: "The Ultra-Modern", The Smart Set, July 1907

1907: "Dim Hours of Dusk", The Smart Set, August 1907

1907: "Disillusion", The Smart Set, December 1907

1909: "Summer in Winter", People’s Magazine, February 1909

1912: "A Canticle of Great Lovers", Ainslee's Magazine, July 1912

§Books[edit]

1915: Tennis As I Play It (ghostwritten for Maurice McLoughlin)[21]

1926: John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer

1929: Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929

1935: Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis

1952: From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930 (edited by Alfred

Harcourt and Oliver Harrison)

1953: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950 (edited by

Harry E. Maule and Melville Cane)

1962: I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories (edited by Mark Schorer)

1962: Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (edited by Mark Schorer)

1985: Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis (edited by John J. Koblas and Dave Page)

1997: If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Anthony Di

Renzo)

2000: Minnesota Diary, 1942-46 (edited by George Killough)

2005: Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (edited by Sally E. Parry)

2005: The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Sally E. Parry)

Sinclair Lewis was a journalist and Nobel Prize winning novelist known for 20th century works like Main Street, Elmer Gantry and Babbitt.Synopsis

Born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis studied at Yale University and worked as a newspaper journalist before becoming an acclaimed novelist. Known for his satirical take on modern affairs, some of his well-known releases included Main Street, Arrowsmith, Babbitt andDodsworth. In 1930, he became the first U.S. writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lewis died on January 10, 1951 in Rome, Italy.