Sinclair Lewis - Biographical Sinclair Lewis The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930 Sinclair Lewis Share this: Sinclair Lewis - Biographical To recount my life for the Nobel Foundation, I would like to present it as possessing some romantic quality, some unique character, like Kipling 's early adventures in India, or Bernard Shaw 's leadership in the criticism of British arts and economics. But my life, aside from such youthful pranks as sailing on cattleships from America to England during university vacations, trying to find work in Panama during the building of the Canal, and serving for two months as janitor of Upton Sinclair's abortive co-operative colony, Helicon Hall, 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. I was born in a prairie village in that most Scandinavian part of America, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor, in 1885. Until I went East to Yale University I attended the ordinary public school, along with many Madsens, Olesons, Nelsons, Hedins, Larsons.

Doubtless it was because of this that I made the hero of my second book, The Trail of the Hawk, a Norwegian, and Gustaf Sondelius, of Arrowsmith, a Swede - and to me, Dr. Sondelius is the favorite among all my characters. Of Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk, I wrote -back in 1914, when I was working all day as editor for the George H. Doran Publishing Company, and all evening trying to write novels - as follows: «His carpenter father had come from Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name (to Americanize it) from Ericsen... Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and china-blue eyes... When he was born the ‹typical Americans› of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the ‹typical American› of his period.

It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty.» My university days at Yale were undistinguished save for contributions to the Yale Literary Magazine. It may be interesting to say that these contributions were most of them reeking with a banal romanticism; that an author who was later to try to present ordinary pavements trod by real boots should through university days have written nearly always of Guinevere and Lancelot - of weary bitterns among sad Irish reeds - of story-book castles with troubadours vastly indulging in wine, a commodity of which the author was singularly ignorant. What the moral is, I do not know. Whether imaginary castles at nineteen lead always to the sidewalks of Main Street at thirty-five, and whether the process might be reversed, and whether either of them is desirable, I leave to psychologists.

I drifted for two years after college as a journalist, as a newspaper reporter in Iowa and in San Francisco, as - incredibly - a junior editor on a magazine for teachers of the deaf, in Washington, D.C. The magazine was supported by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. What I did not know about teaching the deaf would have included the entire subject, but that did not vastly matter, as my position was so insignificant that it included typing hundreds of letters every week begging for funds for the magazine and, on days when the Negro janitress did not appear, sweeping out the office. Doubtless this shows the advantages of a university education, and it was further shown when at the age of twenty-five I managed to get a position in a New York publishing house at all of fifteen dollars a week. This was my authentic value on the labor market, and I have always uncomfortably suspected that it would never have been much higher had I not, accidentally, possessed the gift of writing books which so acutely annoyed American smugness that some thousands of my fellow citizens felt they must read these scandalous documents, whether they liked them or not.

From that New York position till the time five years later when I was selling enough short stories to the magazines to be able to live by free-lancing, I had a series of typical white-collar, unromantic, office literary jobs with two publishing houses, a magazine (Adventure), and a newspaper syndicate, reading manuscripts, writing book advertising, writing catalogues, writing uninspired book reviews - all the carpentry and plumbing of the city of letters. Nor did my first five novels rouse the slightest whispers: Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, The Innocents, and Free Air they were called, published between 1914 and 1919, and all of them dead before the ink was dry. I lacked sense enough to see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue writing. Main Street, published late in 1920, was my first novel to rouse the embattled peasantry and, as I have already hinted, it had really a success of scandal. One of the most treasured American myths had been that all American villages were peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that myth. Scandalous.

Some hundreds of thousands read the book with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth. Since Main Street, the novels have been Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Mantrap (1926); Elmer Gantry (1927); The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928); and Dodsworth (1929). The next novel, yet unnamed, will concern idealism in America through three generations, from 1818 till 1930-an idealism which the outlanders who call Americans «dollar-chasers» do not understand. It will presumably be published in the autumn of 1932, and the author's chief difficulty in composing it is that, after having received the Nobel Prize, he longs to write better than he can. I was married, in England, in 1928, to Dorothy Thompson, an American who had been the Central European correspondent and chef de bureau of the New York Evening Post. My first marriage, to Grace Hegger, in New York, in 1914, had been dissolved.

During these years of novelwriting since 1915, I have lived a quite unromantic and unstirring life. I have travelled much; on the surface it would seem that one who during these fifteen years had been in forty states of the United States, in Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, the West Indies, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Poland, and Russia must have been adventurous. That, however, would be a typical error of biography. 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.

And nowadays, at forty-six, with my first authentic home - a farm in the pastoral state of Vermont - and a baby born in June 1930, I am settled down to what I hope to be the beginning of a novelist's career. I hope the awkward apprenticeship with all its errors is nearly done. Biographical note on Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) continued to be a prolific writer, but none of his later writings equalled the success or stature of his chiefworks of the twenties. After his divorce from his second wife in 1942, Sinclair Lewis lived chiefly in Europe. His later novels include Ann Vickers (I933), It Can't Happen Here (1935), The Prodigal Parents (1938), Gideon Planish (1943), Cass Timberlane (1945), Kingsblood Royal ( 1947), The God-Seeker (1949), and World So Wide (1951). From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis 1919-1930 was published in 1952, one year after his death in Rome.

From Nobel Lectures , Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel . It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures . To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Sinclair Lewis died on January 10, 1951. Nobelprize.org Share this: Award Ceremony Speech Presentation Speech by Erik Axel Karlfeldt , Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy , on December 10, 1930 This year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a native of a part of America which for a long time has had Swedish contacts. He was born at Sauk Centre, a place of about two or three thousand inhabitants in the great cornland of Minnesota. He describes the place in his novel Main Street (1920), though there it is called Gopher Prairie. It is the great prairie, an undulating land with lakes and oak groves, which has produced that little town and many others exactly like it.

The pioneers have need of places to sell their grain, shops to purchase their supplies, banks for their mortgage loans, doctors for their bodies, and clergymen for their souls. There is cooperation between the country and the town, but at the same time there is conflict. Does the town exist for the sake of the country, or the country for the town? The prairie makes its power felt. During the winters, long and cold as ours, terrific storms dump their snow in the wide streets, between low and shabby houses. The summer scorches with an intense heat and the town smells, because it lacks both sewers and street cleaning. Yet the town naturally feels its superiority; it is the flower of the prairie. It has the economic threads in its hands, and it is the focus of civilization - a concentrated, proud America amidst these earth-bound thralls of foreign origin, Germans and Scandinavians. Thus the town lives happily in its self-confidence and its belief in true democracy, which does not exclude a proper stratification of the people, its faith in a sound business morality, and the blessings of being motorized; for there are many Fords in Main Street. To this town comes a young woman filled with rebellious emotions.

She wants to reform the town, inside and out, but fails completely, almost going under in the attempt. As a description of life in a small town, Main Street is certainly one of the best ever written. To be sure, the town is first and foremost American, but it could, as a spiritual milieu, be situated just as well in Europe. Like Mr. Lewis, many of us have suffered from its ugliness and bigotry. The strong satire has aroused local protests, but one need not be keensighted to see the tolerant strain in Lewis's sketch of his native town and its people. Behind the puffed-up complacency of Gopher Prairie, however, lurks jealousy. At the edge of the plain stand cities like St. Paul and Minneapolis, already little metropolitan centres with their skyscraper windows gleaming in the sunlight or the evening's electricity. Gopher Prairie wants to be like them and finds the time ripe for a campaign of progress, based on the rising war price of wheat.

A stump orator is imported, a real rabble-rouser of the peppiest kind, and with blatant eloquence he demonstrates that nothing will be easier than for Gopher Prairie to take the lead and reach the 200,000 class. Mr. Babbitt - George Follansbee Babbitt - is the happy citizen of such a city (Babbitt, 1922). It is called Zenith, but probably it cannot be found on the map under that name. This city with its enlarged horizons hereafter becomes the starting point for Mr. Lewis's critical raids into the territories of Americanism. The city is a hundred times larger than Gopher Prairie and, therefore, a hundred times richer in one hundred per cent Americanism and one hundred times as satisfied with itself, and the enchantment of its optimism and progressive spirit is embodied in George F. Babbitt. As a matter of fact, Babbitt probably approaches the ideal of an American popular hero of the middle class.

The relativity of business morals as well as private rules of conduct is for him an accepted article of faith, and without hesitation he considers it God's purpose that man should work, increase his income, and enjoy modern improvements. He feels that he obeys these commandments and therefore lives in complete harmony with himself and society. His profession, real estate, is the highest in existence, and his house near the city, with its trees and lawn, is standard, inside and out. The make of his car corresponds to his position, and in it he whizzes through the streets, proud as a young hero amidst the perils of the traffic. His family life also corresponds to the bourgeois average. His wife has become used to his masculine rumblings at home, and the children are impertinent, but that is what one expects. He enjoys excellent health, is well-fed and thriving, alert and good-natured. His daily lunches at the club are feasts of instructive business conversation and stimulating anecdotes; he is sociable and winning. Babbitt is furthermore a man with the gift of speech. He has learned all the national slogans and whirls them about with his flowing tongue in his popular talks before clubs and mass meetings.

Not even for the most elevated spirituality does he lack sympathy. He basks in the company of the noted poet, Cholmondeley Frink, who concentrates his genius on the composition of striking, rhymed advertisements for various firms and thereby earns a good annual income. Thus Babbitt lives the life of the irreproachable citizen conscious of his respectability. But the jealousy of the gods broods over a mortal whose happiness grows too great. A soul such as Babbitt's is, of course, incapable of growth; it is a ready-made article from the start. Then Babbitt discovers that he has tendencies toward vice which he has neglected - although not wholly, one ought to add. As he approaches fifty, he hastens to make up for the neglect. He enters into an irregular relationship and joins a frivolous gang of youths, in which he plays the role of a generous sugar daddy. But his deeds find him out. His lunches at the club become more and more painful through the silence and aloofness of his friends. They hint that he is spoiling this chance of future membership in the committee of progress. Here it is naturally New York and Chicago that loom before him.

He succeeds in recovering his better self, and it is edifying to see him kneel in his pastor's study, where he receives absolution. And then Babbitt can once more devote himself to the Sunday school and other socially useful activities. His story ends as it began. That it is institutions as representatives of false ideas, and not individuals, that Mr. Lewis wants to attack with his satire, he has himself indicated. It is then a triumph for his art, a triumph almost unique in literature, that he has been able to make this Babbitt, who fatalistically lives within the borders of an earth-bound but at the same time pompous utilitarianism, an almost lovable individual. Babbitt is naive, and a believer who speaks up for his faith. At bottom there is nothing wrong with the man, and he is so festively refreshing that he almost serves as a recommendation for American snap and vitality. There are bouncers and Philistines in all countries, and one can only wish that half of them were half as amusing as Babbitt. To the splendour of the figure, as well as to other speaking characters in the book, Mr. Lewis has added his unparalleled gift of words.

Listen, for example, to the conversation of a few commercial travellers, sitting together in a compartment of the New York express. An unsuspected halo falls over the profession of selling. «To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales manager, who had an Analysis of Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was ‹Go-getter› and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling - not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling.» Arrowsmith (1925) is a work of a more serious nature. Lewis has there attempted to represent the medical profession and science in all its manifestations. As is well known, American research in the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, and medicine ranks with the best of our age, and it has several times been recognized as such from this very platform. Tremendous resources have been placed at its command. Richly endowed institutions work unceasingly on its development.

That even here some speculative persons want to take advantage of their opportunities may be regarded as inevitable. Private industries are on the alert for scientific discoveries and want to profit from them before they have been tested and finally established. The bacteriologist, for instance, searches with infinite care for vaccines to cure widespread diseases, and the manufacturing chemist wants to snatch them prematurely from his hand for mass production. Under the guidance of a gifted and conscientious teacher, Martin Arrowsmith develops into one of the idealists of science. The tragedy of his life as research worker is that, after making an important discovery, he delays its announcement for constantly renewed tests until he is anticipated by a Frenchman in the Pasteur Institute. The book contains a rich gallery of different medical types. We have the hum of the medical schools with their quarrelling and intriguing professors. Then there is the unpretentious country doctor, recalled from Main Street, who regards it as an honour to merge with his clientele and become their support and solace. Then we have the shrewd organizer of public health and general welfare, who works himself into popular favour and political power.

Next we have the large institutes with their apparently royally independent investigators, under a management which to a certain extent must take into consideration the commercial interests of the donors and drive the staff to forced work for the honour of the institutes. Above these types rises Arrowsmith's teacher, the exiled German Jew, Gottlieb, who is drawn with a warmth and admiration that seem to suggest a living model. He is an incorruptibly honest servant of science, but at the same time a resentful anarchist and a stand-offish misanthrope, who doubts whether the humanity whose benefactor he is amounts to as much as the animals he kills with his experiments. Further we meet the Swedish doctor, Gustaf Sondelius, a radiant Titan, who with singing and courage pursues pests in their lairs throughout the world, exterminates poisonous rats and burns infected villages, drinks and preaches his gospel that hygiene is destined to kill the medical art. Alongside all of this runs the personal history of Martin Arrowsmith. Lewis is much too clever to make his characters without blemish, and Martin suffers from faults which at times seem obstructive to his development, both as a man and as a scientist.

As a restless and irresolute young man he gets his best help from a little woman he encountered at a hospital where she was an insignificant nurse. When he begins to drift about the country as an unsuccessful medical student, he looks her up in a little village in the Far West, and there she becomes his wife. She is a devoted and simple soul, who demands nothing and who patiently waits in her solitude when, bewitched by the siren of science, her husband loses himself in the labyrinths of his work. Later she accompanies him and Sondelius to the plague-infected island where Arrowsmith wants to test his serum. Her death in the abandoned hut, while her husband listens distractedly to another and more earthy siren than that of science, seems like a poetically crowning final act to a life of primitive self-sacrificing femininity. The book is full of admirable learning, certified by experts as being accurate. Though a master of light-winged words, Lewis is never superficial when it comes to the foundations of his art. His study of details is always as careful and thorough as that of such a scientist as Arrowsmith or Gottlieb.

In this work he has built a monument to the profession of his own father, that of the physician, which certainly is not represented by a charlatan or a faker. His big novel Elmer Gantry (1927) is like a surgical operation on one of the most delicate parts of the social body. Presumably it would not pay to search anywhere in the world for the old Puritanical virtues, but possibly one might find in some of the oldest corners of America a remnant of the sect which regarded it as a sin to remarry, once it had pleased God to make one a widower or widow, and wicked to lend money at interest. But otherwise America has no doubt had to moderate its religious rigidity. To what extent a pulpiteer like Elmer Gantry is common over there, we cannot here have the slightest idea. Neither his slapdash style of preaching with his cocky pugilistic manners («Hello, Mr. Devil») nor his successful collecting of money and men inside the gates of the church can hide the sad fact that he is an unusually foul fish. Mr. Lewis has been neither willing nor able to give him any attractive traits.

But as description the book is a feat of strength, genuine and powerful, and its full-flavoured, sombre satire has a devastating effect. It is unnecessary to point out that hypocrisy thrives a little everywhere and that any one who attacks it at such a close range places himself before a hydra with many dangerous heads. Sinclair Lewis's latest work is called Dodsworth (1929). In his books we have previously caught glimpses of the family as one of the most aristocratic in Zenith - a circle where no Babbitt ever gains admission. «Most aristocratic» probably often means in America «richest», but Sam Dodsworth is both aristocratic and rich. Even after 300 years he notices the English blood in his veins and wants to know the land of his ancestors. He is an American, but not a jingo. With him travels his wife, Fran. She is already over forty, while he is fifty. She is a cool beauty, «virginal as the winter wind», though she has grown children. In the European atmosphere she blossoms as a brilliant flower of luxury, revelling in vanity, pleasure, and selfishness.

She goes so far that the quiet man who loves her has to leave her to her fate. Once alone he meditates on the problem «Europe-America», and as a real business man he wants to clear up his accounts with both. He thinks of many things, honestly and without prejudice. One of his observations is that the very soil of Europe has some of the old-time quiet, which is scorned by America, the land of restless record-hunters. But America is the land of youth and daring experiments. And when he returns there, we understand that the heart of Sinclair Lewis follows him. Yes, Sinclair Lewis is an American. He writes the new language - American - as one of the representatives of 120,000,000 souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence. The new great American literature has started with national self-criticism. It is a sign of health. Sinclair Lewis has the blessed gift of wielding his landclearing implement not only with a firm hand but with a smile on his lips and youth in his heart. He has the manners of a new settler, who takes new land into cultivation.

He is a pioneer. Mr. Sinclair Lewis - I have spoken of you to this assembly in a language which you do not understand. I might have abused the occasion to speak ill of you. I have not done it. I have spoken of you as one of the strong, young chieftains of the great new American literature. Besides, you have a special recommendation to Swedish hearts. You were born among our countrymen in America, and you have mentioned them in friendly terms in your renowned books. We are glad to see you here today and glad that our nation has a laurel of its own to bestow on you. And now I ask you to descend with me and receive it from the hand of our King. At the banquet, Tor Hedberg, Member of the Swedish Academy, addressed the laureate: «Finally, Mr. Lewis, in your person we greet that [American] new building on its own American ground. It has been said that the Nobel Prize in Literature has found its way across the Atlantic far too late. If so, it has not been due to any indifference on the part of the Swedish Academy, nor to any lack of knowledge, but rather to an «embarras de richesse».

It has further been said that the award of a prize to your work, in which the follies of mankind - not excluding those that are perhaps special to America - have been scourged, is an expression of some kind of European or Swedish animosity against America. I dare to assert that this is a complete mistake. It is with living humour that you aim the blows of your scourge, and where there is humour, there is a heart too. It is not only the keen and lively intellect, the masterly design of human shapes and characters but also the warm, open, gaily-beating heart that we have appreciated in you». Sinclair Lewis expressed his gratitude and declared that he felt closely related to the Swedish people because of his many acquaintances among the Swedish families of Minnesota. He said that the Nobel Prize had a great significance for him, that it had in fact created a new standard which implied an obligation to improve on what he had done so far. Furthermore, he considered it a high honour to have been awarded the Nobel Prize along with the renowned scholars who received the distinction.

He said that, personally, he had the profoundest respect for the integrity of the scientist, and thought that a man of letters, himself included, should strive for the same integrity. From Nobel Lectures , Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 The Sinclair Lewis Society: Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885. Although he was proud of his Midwestern roots, he traveled widely and was interested in many different aspects of American society, from business and medicine to religion and small town life. His concern with issues involving gender, race, and the powerless in society make his work still vital and pertinent today. As Sheldon Norman Grebstein wrote in his work Sinclair Lewis, Lewis "was the conscience of his generation and he could well serve as the conscience of our own. His analysis of the America of the 1920s holds true for the America of today.

His prophecies have become our truths and his fears our most crucial problems." Sinclair Lewis was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Main Street and Babbitt, and won the award for Arrowsmith (although he turned it down). He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in Rome in 1951. More detailed information is provided both on our time line of Lewis's life and in the almanac of important dates.We invite you to test your Lewis knowledge with our quiz . For those with a sweet tooth, try your hand at making some of Lewis' favorite recipes . E-mail Sally Parry of the Sinclair Lewis Society and let her know how you like them! © 2012 Illinois State University Sinclair Lewis Blog Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and playwright, best known as the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his satirical and critical, yet often sympathetic views of middleï¿½class American life in the 1920s . Through his novels, Sinclair expressed his views on such topics as narrow minds in small towns and insincere preachers. Sinclairï¿½s works include 22 novels and three plays.

Though Lewis at times criticized the American way of living, his basic view of what he called the "American human comedy" was optimistic. Early years Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota to Dr. Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis. Six years later, his mother died of tuberculosis. A year later, his father married Isabel Warner. In 1902, Sinclair attended Oberlin College in Ohio and received his bachelor`s degree from Yale University in 1908. While at Yale, he served as the editor of Literary Magazine and began his writing career as a journalist and editor. In addition, he wrote romantic poetry, followed by stories about knights and fair ladies. Writing for a living After graduating from Yale, Lewis worked for publishing houses and various magazines in Iowa , Carmel, California , San Francisco , Washington, D.C. and New York City . Lewis published his first book, Hike and the Aeroplane, in 1912, under the pseudonym Tom Graham. In 1914, Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, who at the time was an editor at Vogue.

For the next two years, Lewis worked as an editor and advertising manager at the George H. Doran Company. In 1916, he left his job and began to travel extensively with his wife. His marriage to Grace ended in divorce in 1928, and the only child of their union, their son Wells, was killed overseas during World War II . Prizewinning work In 1920, Lewis was finally recognized as a serious author with the publication of his novel, Main Street, based on his home town of Sauk Center. In 1925, he published Arrowsmith, a novel about an idealistic doctor. That work won him the Pulitzer Prize, but he turned it down. In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel Babbitt.

Considered by many to be Lewis`s greatest work, the book was a satirical look at middle-class America through its portrayal of businessman George Babbitt of Zenith, who desired "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it`s too late." News that Lewis had been awarded the Nobel Prize was greeted with displeasure in some American circles, and the committee was particularly criticized by a leading member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lewis used the occasion of his acceptance of the award in Stockholm to respond with a broad criticism of the Academy itself. After noting the major intellectual and artistic stars that were not members, he remarked: It might be answered that, after all, the Academy is limited to fifty members; that, naturally, it cannot include everyone of merit. But the fact is that while most of our few giants are excluded, the Academy does have room to include three extraordinarily bad poets, two very melodramatic and insignificant playwrights, two gentlemen who are known only because they are university presidents, a man who was thirty years ago known as a rather clever humorous draftsman, and several gentlemen of whom -- I sadly confess my ignorance -- I have never heard.

Lewis was a born traveler and spent much of the 1920s with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. His last great work, It Can`t Happen Here, was published in 1935, and described the rise of fascism in the United States. From 1936 to 1942, Lewis wrote several plays and even acted in a few. Flame out From 1928 to 1942, Lewis was married to Dorothy Thompson, a distinguished newspaperwoman and foreign correspondent. That union ended in divorce. Alcohol had played a dominant role in Sinclairï¿½s life, and he died of the effects of advanced alcoholism and heart disease in Rome, Italy, on January 10, 1951. ---- Selected Quotes ---- Sinclair Lewis - Sauk Centre Herald Sinclair Lewis... America's First Nobel Prize Winner Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885. Although he was proud of his Midwestern roots, he traveled widely and was interested in many different aspects of American society, from business and medicine to religion and small town life.

His concern with issues involving women, race, and the powerless in society make his work still vital and pertinent today. As Sheldon Norman Grebstein wrote in his work Sinclair Lewis, Lewis "was the conscience of his generation and he could well serve as the conscience of our own. His analysis of the America of the 1920s holds true for the America of today. His prophecies have become our truths and his fears our most crucial problems." Sinclair Lewis was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Main Street and Babbitt, and won the award for Arrowsmith (although he turned it down). He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in Rome in 1951. US Stamp Gallery >> Sinclair Lewis Great Americans Series Sinclair Lewis Sinclair was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He developed an international reputation in the 1920s for his satirical portrayal of middle-class life in Midwestern small towns and cities in such novels as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth. Other than Elmer Gantry, his further novels were not as critically acclaimed.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which he declined. The Sinclair Lewis Society: FAQ FAQ 3. Why did Sinclair Lewis win the Nobel Prize? Lewis was very honored to be the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy awarded it to him in 1930, because of the five great novels he wrote in the 1920s, Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth. King Gustav gave the prize to Lewis in Stockholm, Sweden, and his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, went with him. Erik Karlfeldt, a poet and secretary of the Academy, introduced Lewis during the prize presentation in a lengthy survey of his five major novels. Karlfeldt applauded Lewis for, among many things, his criticism of American institutions and industry, his satire, and of course, his writing style. Karlfeldt noted Lewis's mastery of language in the character development of Babbitt. Lewis delivered his famous Nobel Lecture to the Academy on December 12, one day after receiving the Prize.

His speech, entitled "The American Fear of Literature," was reprinted widely and caused an enormous uproar in the United States. In it, Lewis criticized the literary standards and limited nature of acclaimed literature in America. He also generously acknowledged other authors including Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, and Ernest Hemingway. After receiving the Prize, Lewis was asked two major questions: what was he going to do with the money and why would he accept the Nobel Prize, but not the Pulitzer. He told the media that he was going to use the money to support a young American author and his family (a private joke: he was referring to himself). Lewis gave two reasons as to why he accepted the Nobel Prize: the Nobel Prize had fewer commercial strings attached and the award was based on a career, not one novel. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) American writer. L - Writers - Last Names in Literature Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951) American writer. Sinclair Lewis was the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also received the Pulitzer Prize for "Arrowsmith." He's famous for his satirical depictions of American life.

Sign Up for Our Free Newsletters Thanks, You're in! Sinclair Lewis Sinclair Lewis The Life of Sinclair Lewis Born in 1886, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Henry Sinclair Lewis became the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The son of a country doctor, from a family of three boys, he grew up introverted and intelligent in this town with a population of 2,800, most of which was Swedish and Norwegian. At the age of 17 he broke free of the mid-west, entering Yale, and from there he worked unsuccessfully in publishing for several years. In his spare time he wrote, and after producing five novels, all of which went unnoticed, he became a household name with Main Street in late 1920. After this publication, he had several consecutive successes: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Mantrap (1926), Elmer Gantry (1927), The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928), and Dodsworth (1929) were all well received.

In 1926 Lewis was to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, but refused. Four years later, however, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Once he began writing, Lewis also traveled a great deal. Though much of his time was spent abroad, he continued to write about the people and towns of his homeland. This excerpt taken from an autobiographical sketch submitted to the Nobel Prize committee details his feelings on the United States: I have travelled much; on the surface it would seem that one who during these fifteen years had been in forty states of the United States, in Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, the West Indies, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Poland, and Russia must have been adventurous. That, however, would be a typical error of biography. 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. The Writing Style of Sinclair Lewis Besides being the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Sinclair Lewis had a writing style that was considered revolutionary. In 1920, the publication year of Main Street, the United States was still feeling the effects of World War I. Glorified both internationally and within the country, Americans were seen as ideal citizens from a superior land. Lewis took a daring stand, and his work brought about the deconstruction of the myth regarding small-town America. Within our class, we have discussed Main Street (1920) and the movie Elmer Gantry (1960), based on Lewis’s book by the same title (1927).

Both of these focused on its setting: the Midwest in the early twentieth century. Centering a story in a midwestern town was not what sets Lewis apart from writers who came before him; it was the manner in which he portrayed those towns. Main Street was not simply Main Street in Gopher Prairie, but a representation of every American town. The sights, sounds, and people were all given names and identities, but none are exclusive to the plains of Minnesota. Main Street opens with this passage that shows exactly what Lewis was known for in his writing. It emphasizes the universality of his characters and settings: 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. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina hills. Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.

What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider. Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark’s annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God’s Country. In the sensitive art of the Rosebud Movie Palace there is a Message, and humor strictly moral. Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith. Would he not betray himself an alien cynic who should otherwise portray Main Street, or distress the citizens by speculating whether there may not be other faiths? In addition to describing his ability to relate the essence of small-town America, this passage demonstrates another aspect that was inherent to the nature of Lewis’s writing. Though Main Street is not a humorous book by any standards, it is written with an entirely satirical edge. Gopher Prairie is shown through the eyes of Will and Carol Kennicott. Will is a country doctor, likely inspired by Lewis’s own father. He represents the common, hard-working American, and sees his town as one.

Recognizing the majesty in the pillars of the bank building, the glory in the fall colors, and individuality of each citizen of his small town, Will Kennicott does indeed see Gopher Prairie as the “climax of civilization”. Carol Kennicott plays the devil’s advocate, showing the reader the irony of Main Street. She recognizes, as Lewis does, that there is nothing phenomenal about these few rows of houses in particular, nothing extraordinary in this town over any of the others that are sprinkled throughout the plains of Minnesota – or anywhere else in the mid-west. It was this sense of irony, in combination with the ability to portray the universal feature of small-town America that led Sinclair Lewis to the winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He acheived this honor "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." More Sinclair Lewis Additional resources for Sinclair Lewis, including a complete list of works, his submitted autobiography, and the Nobel Prize in Literature presentation speech can be found here .

Question: Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win a Nobel Prize for what subject?
Answer: Literature