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

I don't write to escape the drudgery of jobs; but because it is the one thing in life for which I am born for. Sinclair Lewis

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 of tuberculosis when he was three years old and his father re-married to Isabel Warner the following year.

In 1902 he attended Oberlin College in Ohio and from1903-1906 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, Lewis spent some time doing menial labor 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 in 1908.

Like many aspiring writers Lewis began his career freelancing; he sold light verse to magazines like Puck and Life. He wrote short romantic stories about knights and fair ladies. Early influences included authors Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Lewis' first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane published in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. It reflects the fascination young boys of that era had with the growing field of aviation. By 1921 Lewis had six novels published including The Job and The Innocents However, he once stated that his first five novels were "failures." Although not commercially successful his early novels helped to earn him a reputation as a promising new writer on the literary scene.

He supported his novel writing by selling short stories which appeared over a period of many years in the Saturday Evening Post alongside the illustrations of Norman Rockwell.

He married Grace "Gracie" Hegger on April 15, 1914? Their nonreligious service, was held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West. 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. (Lt. Wells Lewis was later killed by a sniper in Piedmont Valley, France (near Alsace-Lorraine) during WW II.

Main Street and Babbitt

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.

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,"

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 1928 he married American journalist Dorothy Thompson after following her about Europe. He spent some time in Britain visiting members of the Bloomsbury group of writers, including . He visited other artists as well in the famed Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he was photographed by surrealist photographer Man Ray.

He also socialized with expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, although he always longed to return to America and bought property in Vermont with second wife Thompson.

In 1930 he won the Nobel Prize and that same year their son Michael Lewis was born. 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."

Later life and career

Lewis' later novels did not have the same social impact or relevance of earlier ones. His last renowned work was It Can't Happen Here, a speculative novel about the election of a fascist U.S. President.

He continued to keep busy writing plays between 1936 and 1942 and even acting in a few of them. Lewis had developed a pattern over the years of working to excess and then between novels drinking to excess. Alcoholism and the stress of dual careers took their toll on his marriage and he and Dorothy Thompson divorced in 1942.

In 1951 he died in Rome of a heart attack. At his own request, his ashes were interred in the family plot at Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Although the citizens of his hometown had endured comparisons to the parodied denizens of "Gopher Prairie" and Main Street over the years, they had enscripted on his tombstone, Sinclair Lewis Author of Main Street. In the end the prodigal son had come home.

Quotations

• The further I get from America the more I want to write about my own country. It's surprising how love of your native land seizes you.

• 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 ISBN 0553214861
• 1925 Arrowsmith ISBN 0451526910
• 1926 Mantrap
• 1927 Elmer Gantry ISBN 0451516532
• 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

Filmology

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References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bucco, Martin, Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott, New York: Twayne 1993. ISBN 0805783776
• 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. ISBN 0271-01503-9
• Lingeman, Richard, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, New York: Random House 2002. ISBN 087351-541-2
• 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://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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