American · b. 1885
Nobel Prize in Literature (1930); Pulitzer Prize (declined)
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist whose Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith anatomized American middle-class life with satirical precision that earned him the first Nobel Prize awarded to an American.
Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, becoming the first American to receive it, and his acceptance speech — a forthright critique of American literary culture’s resistance to serious fiction — was characteristic of his combative relationship with his country’s institutions. His major novels of the 1920s are social X-rays of American life: Main Street (1920) examines a Midwestern small town through the eyes of a woman with larger ambitions; Babbitt (1922) follows a Midwestern real estate agent whose conformism and boosterism mask a deep, inarticulate longing he cannot name. Babbitt gave American English a word for a particular kind of self-satisfied mediocrity.
Arrowsmith (1925), which won the Pulitzer Prize that Lewis refused, is about a medical researcher caught between scientific integrity and commercial pressure — a prescient subject that feels entirely contemporary. Elmer Gantry (1927), about a charismatic evangelist whose faith is wholly corrupt, is his most deliberately offensive novel and perhaps his most read today. It Can’t Happen Here (1935), written in two months as fascism was consolidating in Europe, imagines a fascist takeover of the United States with a prophetic precision that has ensured the book is periodically rediscovered.
Lewis’s weaknesses are real: his plotting can be mechanical and his satire can tip into caricature. His strengths — the sociological precision, the mimicry of American speech, the genuine anger at wasted human potential — are historically significant in ways that outlast technical criticisms. Main Street and Babbitt in particular repay reading for any student of American social history.
by Sinclair Lewis
George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith, is the model American businessman — boosterish, conformist, self-satisfied — who attempts a brief, doomed rebellion against his own life. Lewis's most famous novel gave English a common noun and remains the defining portrait of the American businessman as a social type.
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by Sinclair Lewis
Martin Arrowsmith, a doctor and scientist, moves through the American medical world — country practice, public health, pharmaceutical research — trying to maintain his commitment to pure science against the commercial and social pressures that corrupt everything around him. Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is his most sympathetic — Arrowsmith is the only Lewis hero who earns genuine admiration — and the most thorough of his institutional satires.
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by Sinclair Lewis
Elmer Gantry, a salesman who discovers that religious revivals are a better business than hardware, becomes a successful evangelist — fraudulent, lustful, charismatic, and eventually powerful. Lewis's most controversial novel provoked death threats and bans across the United States and remains the definitive account of American religious hypocrisy and the specific American type — the con man who believes his own con.
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by Sinclair Lewis
Carol Milford, idealistic and educated, marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where she attempts to bring culture and reform to a town that does not want them. Lewis's breakthrough novel is the first great satire of American small-town life — the conformity, the anti-intellectualism, the material comfort as a substitute for meaning — and it made Lewis famous overnight.
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by Sinclair Lewis
In 1936, charismatic demagogue Buzz Windrip wins the US presidency on a platform of patriotism, nostalgia, and contempt for elites, then rapidly dismantles American democracy to establish a fascist state. Seen through the eyes of Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 satire is a manual for recognising authoritarianism written before the word was widely used.
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