Sinclair Lewis turned down a Pulitzer, then became America's first Nobel literature laureate
When Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize, Sinclair Lewis refused it, still stung that Main Street had been passed over. Five years later he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoured for satire that skewered small-town smugness, boosterism and religious hypocrisy.
Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the third son of a stern country doctor who struggled to connect with his sensitive, unathletic boy. Tall, gangly and lonely, he read constantly and kept a diary. At Yale he published romantic poems and sketches and edited the literary magazine, then drifted between jobs, from an Iowa newspaper to the Carmel writers' colony in California. He sold story plots to Jack London, joined the Socialist Party in New York in 1911, and first appeared in print with a boys' adventure potboiler under the pen name Tom Graham.
His breakthrough came with Main Street, published in October 1920 after years of notes on small-town life. His agent hoped for 25,000 sales; it sold 180,000 in six months and an estimated two million within a few years, and his biographer Mark Schorer called it the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing. Babbitt followed in 1922, mocking commercial culture in the invented Midwestern city of Zenith, a setting he reused in later books. Elmer Gantry, with its hypocritical evangelist, was denounced from pulpits and banned in some cities, and decades later earned Burt Lancaster an Oscar.
The Swedish Academy gave special attention to Babbitt when it awarded him the Nobel in 1930. In his lecture he praised contemporaries such as Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway, while complaining that Americans feared any literature that did not glorify the nation, faults included. Months later he accused Theodore Dreiser, whom he had just hailed as a pioneer, of plagiarising a book by his wife Dorothy Thompson, and the quarrel ended with Dreiser slapping him.
He kept writing, producing eleven more novels, the best remembered being It Can't Happen Here in 1935, about a fascist winning the American presidency. Alcohol dogged his later life; after a binge in 1937 doctors told him to choose between sobriety and death, but he left treatment after ten days. He died in 1951. H. L. Mencken once called him a red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds.
Source: Sinclair Lewis
