Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American author known for his novels and short stories of middle class American life between the World Wars. He was the youngest of three boys born and raised in the town of Sauk Center, Minnesota. He attended Oberlin Academy and Yale University, where he became editor of the Yale Literary Magazine. Following graduation in 1908 he wrote for magazines and newspapers, developing a gift for producing shallow but popular stories, and started publishing novels in 1914. He struck gold in 1920 with Main Street, an exceptionally realistic novel about small town life that sold 180,000 copies in the first six months and over two million within a few years. He followed with Babbitt in 1922, the Pulitzer Prize winner Arrowsmith in 1925, Elmer Gantry in 1927, and Dodsworth in 1929. The strength of these works earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, the first American to receive the honor. He wrote eleven more novels, notably It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 about the election of a fascist President. His friend William Shirer summarized his career by noting that “compared to ... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner ... Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together.”

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