Sinclair Lewis

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Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer and playwright.

In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars.

He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women.

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Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds." He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series.

Early life

Born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. He had two older siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble making friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13, he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish–American War. In late 1902, Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance at Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. He entered Yale in 1903, but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewis later became an atheist.

Personal life

In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887–1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis (1917–1944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant during World War II, Wells Lewis was killed in action on October 29 amid Allied efforts to rescue the "Lost Battalion" in France. Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and observed that Sinclair's literary "success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for Lewis's work" and the family moved out of town.

Lewis divorced Grace on April 16, 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist. Later in 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont. They had a son, Michael Lewis (1930–1975), who became a stage actor. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they divorced in 1942.

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. His body was cremated and his remains were buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His final novel World So Wide (1951) was published posthumously.

William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.

In summarizing Lewis's career, Shirer concludes:

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Career

In the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, where Lewis' oldest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared. He became an editor. Lewis went from work to place in an attempt to make ends meet, writing stories for publication, and fighting boredom. He created a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of publications while working for newspapers and publishing houses (and briefly at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony). He also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished book The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Hike and the Aeroplane, Lewis' first published book, was entitled Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that first appeared in 1912 under the name Tom Graham.

Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A History of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). In the same year, another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, was published, an expanded version of a serial story that had previously appeared in Woman's Home Companion. In 1919, Free Air, another resurgent serial story, was published.

Lewis, who migrated to Washington, D.C., committed himself to writing. He began collecting notes for a realistic book about small-town life as early as 1916. After finishing Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920, work on the novel continued into mid-1920. The monumental success of Main Street "was the most major event in twentieth-century American publishing history," Mark Schorer wrote. Lewis's agent had the most optimistic estimate of sales at 25,000 copies. Main Street sold 180,000 copies in the first six months, and estimates of two million were forecast within a few years. Richard Lingeman wrote in 2002, "Main Street made [Lewis] wealthy, [Lewis] prosper], who received over 3 million modern dollars] (almost $5 million as of 2022).

Lewis continued his first grating success with Babbitt (1922), a book that mocked American industry and boosterism. The novel was set in Zenith, a fictional Midwestern town, Winnemac, which Lewis returned to in future books, including Arrowsmith, Gideon Planish, and Dodsworth.

Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a book about an idealistic doctor. Lewis declined the Pulitzer Prize, but Main Street was still upset that it had not won the competition. It was created as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman, and it was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Elmer Gantry (1927), Lewis's book that portrayed an evangelical minister as largely hypocritical. Several religious figures condemned the book and banned it from certain U.S. cities. It was adapted for the screen more than a decade later as the basis of Burt Lancaster's 1960 film in which he received a Best Actor Award for his role in the title role. Two other awards were also given to the film.

Lewis' book Dodsworth (1929), a book about the most affluent and wealthy members of American society, was published by Lewis next. Despite of a lot of wealth and privileges, he portrayed them as living essentially pointless lives. Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for William Wyler's 1936 film version, which was a huge success at the time, was adapted for the Broadway stage in 1934. The film has long been revered; it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1990, and Time magazine named it one of the top movies" of the past 80 years in 2005.

Lewis wrote many short stories for a variety of magazines and newspapers during the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1930, "Little Bear Bongo" (1930) was a tale about a bear cub who wants to escape the circus in search of a better life in the real world, first published in Cosmopolitan magazine. Walt Disney Pictures acquired the tale in 1940 for a potential feature film. Those plans weren't complete until 1947, according to World War II. As part of Disney's feature Fun and Fancy Free campaign, the tale (now called "Bongo") was used.

Lewis, the first writer from the United States to be honoured with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, after Henrik Schück, a member of the Swedish Academy, nominated him in 1930. Babbitt was given special attention in the academy's presentation address. Lewis lauded Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and other scholars, but also writers, that "much of us, not readers alone, but also writers, are still worried about any literature in America that is not a glorification of our sins and virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most stirring of any land in the world today." "Our American professors like their literature, and we're dead," Trump said of it.

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