Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis: The Man Who Put Main Street on Trial

He won the Pulitzer Prize for *Arrowsmith* and refused it. Four years later he stood in Stockholm as the first American ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and used the occasion to tell the world that American writers were cowards: "most of us — not readers alone, but even writers — are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American." He had built his career on doing the opposite, and the country he had spent a decade insulting had made him rich for it.

Sauk Centre

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on 7 February 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a prairie village of the kind he would later put permanently on trial. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, of Welsh descent, was the country doctor; his mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891, and his father remarried Isabel Warner. He was the youngest of three.

He was tall, thin, awkward and disfigured by acne, and he did not fit. The boy who was conspicuously wrong for a small town grew into the writer who took small towns apart — a straightforward piece of psychology that Lewis never bothered to disguise.

Yale, and the Plot Merchant

He went to Oberlin Academy in 1902 and then to Yale from 1903 to 1908, interrupting the degree for work and travel and publishing in the student literary magazines. Afterwards came the long apprenticeship: newspaper jobs in Iowa and San Francisco, publishing houses in New York, commercial fiction turned out to order, and a sideline selling plots to Jack London — one of which became *The Assassination Bureau, Ltd*.

Between 1914 and 1919 he published five novels that went nowhere. He was thirty-five and, by any reasonable measure, a competent hack.

Main Street

*Main Street* (1920) changed that in a season. It sold 180,000 copies in six months and earned him the equivalent of roughly $3 million in today's money. The Nobel Foundation's biographical note says it "roused the embattled peasantry" by going after the most sacred American myth available — the idea that the small town was the moral centre of the republic. Lewis's prairie village is instead a conspiracy of dullness that punishes anyone who wants something else.

The remarkable commercial fact is that the book was bought in vast numbers by the very people it was about.

Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Gantry

Then came the decade that justifies everything. *Babbitt* (1922) took on the commercial culture of the American businessman with such fidelity that its protagonist's surname became a common noun. *Arrowsmith* (1925) won the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined. *Elmer Gantry* (1927) put a hypocritical evangelist at the centre of a bestseller in a country that took its revivalists seriously. *Dodsworth* followed in 1929.

Stockholm

In 1930 he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. What the Swedish Academy was rewarding, in its own summary, was his portrayal of "the Average Citizens of the United States" in all their contradictions — the friendliness beside the provincialism, the material appetite beside the genuine idealism.

His Nobel lecture was not a thank-you. It was an attack on the timidity of American letters, delivered by the one American who had proved it could be otherwise. The Nobel Foundation's own account of him is blunt about the method: his work provoked American society by attacking its cherished myths, and it did so from inside, in the idiom of the people whose myths they were.

The Long Decline

*It Can't Happen Here* (1935), a novel about a fascist takeover of the American presidency, was the last major book. Around it, his life came apart. He had married the editor Grace Livingston Hegger in 1914; they had a son, Wells, and divorced in 1928. He married the journalist Dorothy Thompson in May 1928, had a second son, Michael, and divorced in 1942. Wells was killed in action in 1944.

Lewis drank, heavily and then catastrophically, checking into psychiatric treatment in 1937. He kept publishing, and the Nobel Foundation's own note observes drily that the later writing never matched the achievements of the 1920s.

Why Sinclair Is Called a Genius

The gift was mimicry at industrial scale: an ear for the exact cadence of American commercial speech, and the patience to transcribe it until it convicted itself. *Babbitt* works because George F. Babbitt's booster oratory is reproduced so faithfully that no authorial verdict is needed — the reader supplies it. Lewis reported his novels the way a journalist reports a beat, and the payoff is measurable in the language itself: "Babbitt" became an English noun and "Main Street" a synonym for provincial narrowness. Few novelists in any language have put a word in the dictionary by inventing a character, and fewer while the subject was still alive to take offence.

The Nobel citation locates the same double vision — the Average Citizen's friendliness and provincialism, appetite and idealism, held together. Lewis satirised the small town without ever quite deciding he was superior to it, which is precisely why small-town America bought 180,000 copies of the book that mocked it.

The counter-case is strong and has largely won. His scholarly reputation fell steadily across the twentieth century, overtaken by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who could do things at the sentence level Lewis simply could not. His characters are frequently social types rather than people; once the target is identified, the books hold few surprises. And the decline after 1930 was long, public and alcoholic. The honest verdict: a satirist of genius and a novelist of the second rank — a distinction his own later work makes impossible to argue away.

Legacy

He died in Rome on 10 January 1951, aged sixty-five, of advanced alcoholism. His remains were buried in Sauk Centre, the town he had made infamous, and *World So Wide* was published posthumously that year.

The revival came from an unexpected direction. Since the 2010s, and sharply after 2016, *It Can't Happen Here* has sold in numbers it had not seen since publication — a 1935 novel about how an American democracy might vote its way into authoritarianism, read as a manual rather than a curiosity. The satirist whose reputation the professors had quietly retired turned out to have written one book that was waiting.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1930
• Notable work: It Can't Happen Here
• Notable work: Babbitt