Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. A bookish, awkward boy, he studied at Yale, where he wrote for the literary magazine, and spent some time at Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in New Jersey. After years of journalism and publishing work and several modest novels, he won sudden fame with Main Street (1920), a satire of a Minnesota town modeled on his own. Babbitt (1922) followed, giving the language a word for the complacent businessman. Arrowsmith (1925), about a young doctor and medical research, won the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined. Elmer Gantry (1927) attacked a hypocritical preacher, and Dodsworth (1929) followed an American industrialist in Europe. In 1930 he became the first American awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His later books, including It Can't Happen Here (1935), about a fascist takeover of the United States, were uneven. He struggled with alcoholism and two failed marriages, the second to the journalist Dorothy Thompson. He died in Rome in 1951.

Sinclair Lewis is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Developed a religious enthusiasm as a student at Oberlin that waxed and waned; he later became an atheist. Source: Wikipedia