Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 — January 10, 1951) was an American novelist and playwright. He has been called, “the conscience of his generation” for his satirical portrayals of American cultural manners and mores from small town provincialism to religious fundamentalism. During the “speakeasy” decade of the 1920s America was “coming of age,” developing an identity that was caught between the old fashioned values of immigrant fathers and the growing materialistic aspirations of a younger generation.

Lewis addressed themes largely repressed in novels, up until that time, such as feminism, racism and fascism. Even the sacrosanct institution of capitalism was jocularly impugned. Like Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, he sometimes scandalized a nation but in the final analysis he was successful in his social critiques because he believed in the character and heart of America and in its ability to change.

In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “powerful and vivid art of description and the ability to use wit and humor in the creation of original characters.” His goal was to write “realistic novels that were truthful,” even while purposely spurning his critics. In so doing, he captured the American vernacular and character: the hopes, the dreams, and the glaring shortcomings of a young nation.

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

He was born Harry Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His father was Dr. Edwin J. Lewis; his mother Emma Kermott Lewis died of tuberculosis when he was three years old, and his father subsequently re-married Isabel Warner the following year. He was an avid reader and town legend had it that he read every book in the public library before graduating from high school. Early literary influences included authors Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. He built a small theater in the barn in back of his house and kept a cast of characters made from keys ((which he called "the key people"). He began a diary at age 15, a habit that he maintained throughout life.

In 1902 he attended Oberlin College in Ohio where he was involved with Christian youth activities through the YMCA but he became discouraged with organized relgion (and most other organized institutions of any kind). He wrote in his diary "There are many things as to the Christian religion that make it almost impossible to believe it." He remained an agnostic throughout life. From 1903-1906 he attended Yale University where he served as editor of their Literary Magazine.

After college he worked at a variety of odd jobs including spending two summers on a cattleboat. In 1906, Lewis boarded 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. 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." However, though not commercially successful his early novels did help 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 Livingstone Hegger]. on April 15, 1914. The simple wedding was held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Central Park West.

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 Virginia Wolfe and E.M. Forster. He visited artists of the Lost Generation - expatriates living in the famed Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (another Minnesotan). He was photographed by surrealist photographer Man Ray.

The restless Lewis travelled often but always longed to return to America. He and Thompson bought property in Vermont where their son Michael Lewis was born in 1930. That same year he won the Nobel Prize mostly for his work on the novel Babbitt. 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

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

He wrote plays between 1936 and 1942, even acting in a few of them. He oversaw the stage production of Dodsworth. 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 good naturedly endured comparisons to the parodied denizens of "Gopher Prairie" and Main Street over the years, they had enscripted on his tombstone, simply 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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