Sinclair Lewis

His father was the doctor in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a stern man who could not find much use for a sensitive, unathletic third son. His mother died when he was six. The boy who grew up in that house was tall, extremely thin, pop-eyed and badly marked with acne, could not make friends, and at 13 ran off to enlist as a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War, which did not take him either. Yale took him in 1903, though it needed five years to produce a degree, interrupted by a stint at Upton Sinclair's cooperative colony in New Jersey and a trip to Panama. Afterward he wrote whatever sold, including story plots he sold outright to Jack London, one of them for a novel London never finished.

Main Street came out on October 23, 1920. The publisher had printed for 25,000 copies. It sold 180,000 in six months and something near two million in the years after, which his biographer called the most sensational event in the century's American publishing. Babbitt followed in 1922 and put a word for the boosterish businessman into the language. Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 and he refused it, still sore that Main Street had not won. Elmer Gantry in 1927 got him denounced from pulpits and banned in several cities. Then Dodsworth, and in 1930 the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first ever given to a writer from the United States, which he used in Stockholm to tell the Swedes that his countrymen were frightened of any book that did not flatter them.

In March 1931 he accused Theodore Dreiser of lifting material from a book by Dorothy Thompson, who was his wife, and at a New York dinner Dreiser slapped him in the face, more than once, in front of the room. The drinking was the longer problem. In 1937 he checked into a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the doctors put it to him plainly that he could live without alcohol or die by it, and he left after ten days. He married twice and divorced twice, Grace Hegger in 1914 and Thompson in 1928, and the second marriage was effectively over by 1937. In 1940 he taught creative writing at Wisconsin for five classes, announced that he had taught the students everything he knew, and went home. His son Wells was killed in France on October 29, 1944.

He died in Rome on January 10, 1951, at 65. The record gives advanced alcoholism, though his friend William Shirer insisted it was a heart attack in a man whose doctors had told him to stop drinking. The ashes went home to Sauk Centre, the town he had made a byword for narrowness, and were buried there. His standing then fell for half a century — Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who sold a fraction of what he did in the 1920s, took the shelf space and the syllabus. What brought readers back after 2010 was not the satire on small towns but It Can't Happen Here, the 1935 novel about an American president elected on a promise of order.

Sinclair Lewis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Main Street book
  180,000 copies in six months against a print plan of 25,000 1920
• Babbitt book
  Set in the invented city of Zenith — the title became a common noun 1922
• Arrowsmith book
  Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, which he refused 1925
• Elmer Gantry book
  Denounced from pulpits and banned in several American cities 1927
• Dodsworth book
  Filmed by William Wyler in 1936 and later added to the National Film Registry 1929
• It Can't Happen Here book
  A fascist elected president of the United States — back on bestseller lists after 2016 1935

• 1891 aged ~6 His mother dies His father, the town doctor, remarried the following year.
• 1898 aged ~13 Runs away at 13 to enlist as a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War
• 1908 aged ~23 Takes his Yale degree, five years after entering He had broken off to work at Upton Sinclair's cooperative colony in New Jersey and to travel to Panama.
• October 23, 1920 aged 35 Main Street is published It sold 180,000 copies in six months.
• 1926 aged ~41 Declines the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith He was still angry that Main Street had not won it.
• December 12, 1930 aged 45 Delivers the Nobel lecture, The American Fear of Literature The first Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to an American.
• March 1931 aged 46 Theodore Dreiser slaps him at a New York dinner Lewis had publicly accused him of plagiarizing Dorothy Thompson.
• October 29, 1944 aged 59 His son Wells is killed in action in France He was a US Army lieutenant in the effort to reach the Lost Battalion.
• January 10, 1951 aged 65 Dies in Rome at 65 His ashes were buried at Sauk Centre.

• Dorothy Thompson 1893–1961
  Columnist and radio broadcaster who was one of the most influential women in American media. married to
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. worked at his colony
• H.L. Mencken 1880–1956
  Satirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century. champion and critic
• Willa Cather 1873–1947
  Novelist whose work made immigrant settlement and the Great Plains central subjects of American literature. praised in the Nobel lecture
• Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction. praised in the Nobel lecture
• F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940
  Novelist who captured the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby, the defining novel of the American Dream. took his shelf space