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Impact & Influence |
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The first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis remains influential as both a Minnesotan and American writer. His work is often praised for its commentary on social cultures and business practices of the 1920s and 1930s, and usually focuses on the average American citizen, plain speech and common life. His first novel,
Hike and Aeroplane, was published in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham, but it wasn't until 1920 that Lewis gained critical success with
Main Street. Set in the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota,
Main Street uses satire, realism and intricate details to portray smalltown life. Many of his works, including Babbitt in 1922, employ the same techniques. In addition to penning several novels, many of Lewis' works were turned into plays, movies or television show episodes. He gained notoriety in 1925 when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
Arrowsmith. Five years later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature, he told the Nobel Society (as printed in Les Prix Nobel):
"(M)y life ... has been a rather humdrum chronicle of much reading, constant writing, undistinguished travel à la tripper, and several years of comfortable servitude as an editor.
The fact is that my foreign travelling has been a quite uninspired recreation, a flight from reality. 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."
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Biography |
Although he would eventually travel the world, it was to the Midwestern plains Sinclair Lewis would return most often in his fictional works. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, Minnesota in 1885, Lewis left for an Ohio prep school in 1902. He later attended Yale University, spent a summer in Panama and worked at Helicon Hall, novelist and social critic Upton Sinclair's experimental artists' colony. Upon graduating from Yale in 1908, Lewis moved to New York to work various publishing jobs, and later to Washington D.C. to begin in earnest his career as a writer, which would prove to be prolific. He married twice, divorced twice and had two sons. Following struggles with alcoholism, Lewis died in Rome in 1951.
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Major Works |
Hike and the Aeroplane (1912, as Tom Graham)
Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
The Trail of the Hawk (1916)
The Job (1917)
The Innocents (1917)
Free Air (1919)
Main Street (1920)
Babbitt (1922)
Arrowsmith (1925)
Mantrap (1926)
Elmer Gantry (1927)
The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928)
Dodsworth (1929)
Ann Vickers (1933)
Work of Art (1934)
It Can't Happen Here (1935)
The Prodigal Parents (1938)
Bethel Merriday (1940)
Gideon Planish (1943)
Cass Timberlane (1945)
Kingsblood Royal (1947)
The God-Seeker (1949)
World So Wide (1951, published posthumously)
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Scholarly Works |
The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930, James M. Hutchisson
Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, Richard Lingeman
Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Schorer
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Audio/Video |
Sorry, none available at this time.
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Sinclair Lewis
Hometown:
Sauk Centre, Minnesota
February 7, 1885 -
January 10, 1951
Minnesota Ties:
Grew up in Minnesota, and set many fictional works here
Education:
Yale University (bachelor's degree)
Known for:
The first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
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