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Writer (1885-1951). 

Sinclair Lewis
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     Born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908.  Over the next few years, he travelled throughout the country, working sporadically as a free-lance writer.  He published his first novel in 1914, and achieved some early popular success with stories written for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post.  He established his literary reputation in the 1920s with a series of satirical novels about contemporary American mores, including Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929).  In these novels, Lewis savagely mocked the provincialism, conformism and hypocrisy he saw at the heart of middle American culture.  His central characters strive to escape their emotionally and intellectually repressive environments, with varying degrees of success.  In 1926, he turned down the Pulitzer Prize awarded him for Arrowsmith.  In 1930, however, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, bestowed "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

SOURCES:  Encyclopedia of American Biography; Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography. 

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Last updated Tuesday, November 18, 1998