Sinclair Lewis
1 book in the library
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. After Yale he worked in journalism and publishing and wrote several novels that attracted little notice, until Main Street (1920), a satire of small-town Midwestern life, became a sensation. It was followed by Babbitt (1922), about a conformist businessman, whose name became a word for the type, Arrowsmith (1925), about a dedicated medical researcher, for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize, Elmer Gantry (1927), about a fraudulent preacher, and Dodsworth (1929). In 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was married for some years to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whose reporting on Nazi Germany informed It Can’t Happen Here (1935). His later work was less successful, and after years of heavy drinking he died in Rome in 1951.
