Sinclair Lewis was born Harry Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, United States, on February 7, 1885, the third son of a country doctor. In most of his autobiographical remarks, Lewis pictured his boyhood as happy, normal, and full of country pleasures, but as his unpublished diaries show, it was in fact dreary and frustrating. Homely, poorly coordinated, nearly friendless, and often an object of derision, he retreated early into books.
Graduating without distinction from the local high school in 1902, he fretted to be elsewhere. His father agreed that he could go to Yale after a necessary preparatory course of six months at Oberlin. Oberlin and Yale were no better than Sauk Centre. He graduated in 1908 with the class of 1907 by special action of a forgiving faculty.
For about a year he worked at various jobs in New York, Lewis tried to live as a free-lance writer, but the children's verse that he managed to sell hardly served to support him. After a desperate attempt to find work in Panama during the construction of the Canal, he went gratefully back to New Haven (and to his father's meager support) to finish up his college course one year after his class.
Armed with a file of many plots for stories and novels, Lewis held a series of jobs across the United States before settling, in 1910, into a small editorial post at Frederick A. Stokes Publishing Co. in New York. Known now as Sinclair Lewis and, more intimately, as "Red, " he published flimsy stories in obscure and sometimes strange magazines and tried to write a novel. In 1913 he finished his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, which was published in February 1914. He changed jobs for the last time when he went to Doran & Co. Our Mr. Wrenn was followed by four more novels, none of them conspicuously successful. At their best, they are informed by an optimism derived from H. G. Wells and by a certain Dickensian power of social observation; at their worst, they are rickety in construction and sentimental.
In 1915 the successful sale of a number of stories to The Saturday Evening Post had freed Lewis from other employment for writing, and he continued to publish prolifically in the commercial magazines while he produced his novels. A son, Wells, was born in 1917, and the family lived all over the United States unitil, in 1919, they settled for nearly two years in Washington, D. C. There Lewis finished his sixth, and first major, novel, Main Street, in 1920. Its publication and phenomenal success created one of the most sensational events in American publishing history. One of its effects was to establish the new firm of Harcourt, Brace and Co.
For the next decade, while the Lewises lived in various parts of the United States and Europe and their marriage fell into decay, he produced a succession of novels - Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929) - that commanded an enormous audience, a large part of which they outraged. Novels of a broad satirical bias, they created for American and European readers sharp images of the provinciality, materialism, hypocrisy, and aesthetic emptiness of life in the United States, and they made Lewis appear as one of the major writers in American literary history. On May 14, 1928, before the publication of Dodsworth, a novel that marked a certain softening in his views, he married the newspaperwoman, Dorothy Thompson. In 1927 he had created a sensation when he declined the Pulitzer Prize, and at the end of 1930 he created another when he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His speech of acceptance, a historic document, deplored the continuing gentility in American letters and at the same time hailed their emancipation from Europe. The prize, marking the high point of his career, also marked the beginning of its decline. He broke with Harcourt in a fit of pique. He was to publish ten more novels, and many of them - especially the anti-fascist It Can't Happen Here (1935) - continued to cause momentary excitement and to run up enormous sales figures. However, the vein of sentiment always present in his work grew larger, the construction shabbier, the characterization shallower, and the subjects less important.
For a time Lewis took to the stage, both as playwright and as actor, but without success. Always restless and quickly impatient with any one place or set of people, he rented or bought enormous establishments in various parts of the United States and Europe, lived in them briefly, rid himself of them abruptly, and moved on.
At his best, Sinclair Lewis was a novelist with a powerful talent for mimicry and an incisive gift for the creation of social stereotypes; he had also an extraordinary sense in judging the mood of the times. His literary importance was probably overestimated in the 1920's, but his sociological importance, his contribution to American self-awareness, was probably underestimated. One of the least satisfactory stylists in modern American literature, it is nevertheless almost impossible to imagine modern American literature without him.
He became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930).
( Prosperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appea...)
(The first of Sinclair Lewiss great successes, Main Stree...)
(With an afterword by E. L. Doctorowthe Pulitzer Prize-wi...)
Lewis was nonreligious and an atheist.
Old beyond his years because of a long addiction to alcohol, from which he could only temporarily free himself, he ended his peregrinations in Europe in 1950. There he lived chiefly in Italy, lonely among strangers, making fitful attachments to anyone who came along.
In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887–1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son. Lewis divorced Grace in 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist. They had a son. They divorced in 1942.
