Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 — January 10, 1951) was an American novelist and playwright. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters". His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values. His style is at times droll, satirical, yet sympathetic.

Early life and career

Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885 he began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. A dreamer, at age 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War. His father was Dr. Edwin J. Lewis; his mother Emma Kermott Lewis died when he was three years old and his father married Isabel Warner the following year. In 1902 he attended Oberlin College in Ohio and in 1903-1906 he attended Yale University where he served as editor of their Literary Magazine. He worked at a variety of odd jobs including spending two summers on a cattleboat. In 1906, peripatetic and adventurous he spent some time doing odd jobs at Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall, the experimental (utopian community. (In the future the public would constantly be confusing the two authors' names). He received his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1908.

He began his writing career by writing short romantic stories about knights and fair ladies. Early influences included authors Sir Francis Drake and Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, described as a boy's adventure story, it appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. By 1921 he had six novels published. However, Lewis has said that his first five novels were "failures." (ref) He was married to Grace Hegger on April 15, 1914 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West. Neither one wanted a religious ceremony and Lewis was to remain an agnostic throughout his life. That same year his novel Our Mr. Wrenn was published. In 1917, son Wells was born, named after H.G. Wells, an author that Lewis greatly admired and whose futuristic stories gave inspiration to young intellectuals of the era.

Main Street and Babbitt

Lewis was known for giving strong characterization to modern working women and for his concern with race. Some of his most famous books were Main Street and Babbitt. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926; - which he rejected - ; for Arrowsmith, a novel about an idealistic doctor. Elmer Gantry was the story of an opportunistic evangelist, if not an outright charlatan; it was banned in Boston and other U.S. cities; Main Street, Babbitt, Kingsblood Royal, and Cass Timberlane all were banned in their turn. In his Prize lecture, he 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."

Main Street was published by Alfred Harcourt on Oct. 23, 1920 and sold 200,000 copies within a few months. By 1951 it sold two million copies in the United States. It was the first American novel to become a success by criticizing popular culture. Main Street was published during a time when American culture was being questioned. World War I had just ended; prohibition was an issue and women were declared legally equal to men. "Americans were questioning themselves about what their country really stood for, what its place in history would be and should be,"

In 1928 he married journalist Dorothy Thompson. In 1930 he won the Nobel Prize and that same year their son Michael Lewis was born. The restless Lewis traveled much, and in the 1920s would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he would be photographed by Man Ray. His last great work was It Can't Happen Here, a speculative novel about the election of a fascist U.S. President.

Later life and career

1936-1942 Writes several plays and acts in a few of them. 1942 divorces Thompson 1948 Lt. Wells Lewis killed by sniper in Piedmont Valley, France (near Alsace-Lorraine) during WW II.

Alcohol played a dominant role in his life; he died of advanced alcoholism in Rome. He created the fictional cities of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota and Zenith, Winnemac. 1951 Dies in Rome of heart disease. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, MN. World So Wide published posthumously.

ArtAssists Sidney Howard in adapting Dodsworth to the stage.

Quotations

• This is America - a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called 'Gopher Prairie, Minnesota'. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere.

• Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

• My real travelling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world - the Average Citizens of the United States, with their friendliness to strangers and their rough teasing, their passion for material advancement and their shy idealism, their interest in all the world and their boastful provincialism - the intricate complexities which an American novelist is privileged to portray.

Works

• 1912 Hike and the Aeroplane
• 1914 Our Mr.Wrenn
• 1917 The Job
• 1917 The Innocents
• 1919 Free Air
• 1920 Main Street ISBN 1406505552
• 1922 Babbitt
• 1925 Arrowsmith ISBN 0451526910
• 1926 Mantrap
• 1927 Elmer Gantry
• 1928 The Man Who Knew Coolidge
• 1929 Dodsworth
• 1933 Ann Vickers
• 1934 Work of Art
• 1935 It Can't Happen Here
• 1938 The Prodigal Parents
• 1940 Bethel Merriday
• 1943 Gideon Planish
• 1945 Cass Timberlane
• 1947 Kingsblood Royal
• 1949 The God Seeker

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bucco, Martin Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott, New York: Twayne 1993.
• Grebstein, Sheldon Norman Sinclair Lewis, New York: Twayne, 1962
• Hutchisson, James M.The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930, University Park: Pennsylvania State U P, 1996.
• Lingeman, Richard Sinclair Lewis, Rebel from Main Street, New York: Random House 2002.
• Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 31.3, Autumn 1985, special issues on Sinclair Lewis.
• Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference, 1985.

SOURCE: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/separry/lewis.html http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-autobio.html retrieved March 13, 2007

http://www.saukherald.com/ftp/lewis/stories.html retrieved March 13, 2007.

External links

• Online collection of works
• Works by Sinclair Lewis. Project Gutenberg
• his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.
• Sinclair Lewis Society
• Autobiography

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1926-1950)

Template:Sinclair Lewis

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