Lewis, Sinclair (1885–1951)

Sinclair Lewis, satiric novelist, was the first American to be honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. Born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis abandoned the thought of becoming a Christian missionary in 1903 and entered Yale University. He took a temporary leave in the fall of 1906 to live in the utopian colony Helicon Hall, founded by Upton Sinclair with the proceeds from The Jungle, but left because working as a janitor did not support his aspirations as a writer.

Lewis began publishing novels in 1912, and his short stories in popular magazines from this period began to find an audience in the early 21st century. His best-known novels are Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922).

Main Street centers on the story of Carol Kennicott, a woman of the world trapped in the fictional Gopher Prairie, Illinois. Her efforts to combat the provincialism of her hometown—encouraging her women's group to go beyond “the Bible as literature” and “furnishings and China” into chemistry, anthropology, or labor problems—are met with scorn. She temporarily finds an escape in Washington, D.C., by doing war work, but returns to Gopher Prairie to find it unchanged. Babbitt follows the daily minutia of salesman George Babbitt's life in the city of Zenith (a fictional city, but one that has the same suburbs as Buffalo, New York). Throughout the novel are hints of Babbitt's suppressed radical past that contrast with his present course of self-improvement and civic responsibility, his fallen friend Paul Riesling being a carryover from his idealistic college days. Babbitt attempts to reassert his radical aspirations but is reclaimed by the Rotarians and Boosters after a scare in the hospital.

Others of Lewis's novels are Arrowsmith (1925), which sketches the path of a small-town doctor in industrial America, Elmer Gantry (1927), which tells how an aimless college man transforms himself into an evangelist, and It Can't Happen Here (1936), which details the election of a fascist regime in the United States. The mastery of these, as of all his novels, is the use of a character whom the readers initially distrust but, as the stories progress, they come to feel a certain sympathy for: In the end, readers despise the environment that requires the characters to lose their ideals, that frustrates their ambitions, and that provides encouragement for their misdeeds.