Sinclair Lewis - Wikipedia

Thanks for the share!!

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that February 7 is the anniversary of the birth American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Harry Sinclair Lewis who became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 after turning down the Pulitzer prize in 1926.

Sinclair Lewis Documentary 60 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04dCqT046AA


Images:
1. Portrait photograph of Sinclair Lewis by Arnold Genthe on March 7, 1914
2. Nobel Prize winners were guests of honor at a dinner Dec. 18, 1933, in the Hotel Roosevelt in New York to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Nobel. From left: Sinclair Lewis (literature); Frank B. Kellogg, former secretary of state; Albert Einstein, world-famous scientist; and Irving Langmuir (chemistry).
3. Sinclair Lewis and friends, ca. 1916. Lewis sits in the rocking chair at right; his wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, wears a maid’s uniform and stands at left.
4. Sinclair Lewis and his son Wells, ca. 1925.

Biographies
1. nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1930/lewis/biographical/
2. cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/sinclair-lewis-biography

1. Background from {[https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1930/lewis/biographical/]}
"Sinclair Lewis Biographical
To recount my life for the Nobel Foundation, I would like to present it as possessing some romantic quality, some unique character, like Kipling‘s early adventures in India, or Bernard Shaw‘s leadership in the criticism of British arts and economics. But my life, aside from such youthful pranks as sailing on cattleships from America to England during university vacations, trying to find work in Panama during the building of the Canal, and serving for two months as janitor of Upton Sinclair’s abortive co-operative colony, Helicon Hall, has been a rather humdrum chronicle of much reading, constant writing, undistinguished travel à la tripper, and several years of comfortable servitude as an editor.
I was born in a prairie village in that most Scandinavian part of America, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor, in 1885. Until I went East to Yale University I attended the ordinary public school, along with many Madsens, Olesons, Nelsons, Hedins, Larsons. Doubtless it was because of this that I made the hero of my second book, The Trail of the Hawk, a Norwegian, and Gustaf Sondelius, of Arrowsmith, a Swede – and to me, Dr. Sondelius is the favorite among all my characters.
Of Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk, I wrote -back in 1914, when I was working all day as editor for the George H. Doran Publishing Company, and all evening trying to write novels – as follows:
«His carpenter father had come from Norway, by way of steerage and a farm in Wisconsin, changing his name (to Americanize it) from Ericsen… Carl was second-generation Norwegian; American-born, American in speech, American in appearance, save for his flaxen hair and china-blue eyes… When he was born the ‹typical Americans› of earlier stocks had moved to city palaces or were marooned on run-down farms. It was Carl Ericson, not a Trowbridge or a Stuyvesant or a Lee or a Grant, who was the ‹typical American› of his period. It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty.»
My university days at Yale were undistinguished save for contributions to the Yale Literary Magazine. It may be interesting to say that these contributions were most of them reeking with a banal romanticism; that an author who was later to try to present ordinary pavements trod by real boots should through university days have written nearly always of Guinevere and Lancelot – of weary bitterns among sad Irish reeds – of story-book castles with troubadours vastly indulging in wine, a commodity of which the author was singularly ignorant. What the moral is, I do not know. Whether imaginary castles at nineteen lead always to the sidewalks of Main Street at thirty-five, and whether the process might be reversed, and whether either of them is desirable, I leave to psychologists.
I drifted for two years after college as a journalist, as a newspaper reporter in Iowa and in San Francisco, as – incredibly – a junior editor on a magazine for teachers of the deaf, in Washington, D.C. The magazine was supported by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. What I did not know about teaching the deaf would have included the entire subject, but that did not vastly matter, as my position was so insignificant that it included typing hundreds of letters every week begging for funds for the magazine and, on days when the Negro janitress did not appear, sweeping out the office.
Doubtless this shows the advantages of a university education, and it was further shown when at the age of twenty-five I managed to get a position in a New York publishing house at all of fifteen dollars a week. This was my authentic value on the labor market, and I have always uncomfortably suspected that it would never have been much higher had I not, accidentally, possessed the gift of writing books which so acutely annoyed American smugness that some thousands of my fellow citizens felt they must read these scandalous documents, whether they liked them or not.
From that New York position till the time five years later when I was selling enough short stories to the magazines to be able to live by free-lancing, I had a series of typical white-collar, unromantic, office literary jobs with two publishing houses, a magazine (Adventure), and a newspaper syndicate, reading manuscripts, writing book advertising, writing catalogues, writing uninspired book reviews – all the carpentry and plumbing of the city of letters. Nor did my first five novels rouse the slightest whispers: Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, The Innocents, and Free Air they were called, published between 1914 and 1919, and all of them dead before the ink was dry. I lacked sense enough to see that, after five failures, I was foolish to continue writing.
Main Street, published late in 1920, was my first novel to rouse the embattled peasantry and, as I have already hinted, it had really a success of scandal. One of the most treasured American myths had been that all American villages were peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that myth. Scandalous. Some hundreds of thousands read the book with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth.
Since Main Street, the novels have been Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Mantrap (1926); Elmer Gantry (1927); The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928); and Dodsworth (1929). The next novel, yet unnamed, will concern idealism in America through three generations, from 1818 till 1930-an idealism which the outlanders who call Americans «dollar-chasers» do not understand. It will presumably be published in the autumn of 1932, and the author’s chief difficulty in composing it is that, after having received the Nobel Prize, he longs to write better than he can.
I was married, in England, in 1928, to Dorothy Thompson, an American who had been the Central European correspondent and chef de bureau of the New York Evening Post. My first marriage, to Grace Hegger, in New York, in 1914, had been dissolved.
During these years of novelwriting since 1915, I have lived a quite unromantic and unstirring life. I have travelled much; on the surface it would seem that one who during these fifteen years had been in forty states of the United States, in Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Greece, Switzerland, Spain, the West Indies, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Poland, and Russia must have been adventurous. That, however, would be a typical error of biography. The fact is that my foreign travelling has been a quite uninspired recreation, a flight from reality. My real travelling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world – the Average Citizens of the United States, with their friendliness to strangers and their rough teasing, their passion for material advancement and their shy idealism, their interest in all the world and their boastful provincialism – the intricate complexities which an American novelist is privileged to portray.
And nowadays, at forty-six, with my first authentic home – a farm in the pastoral state of Vermont – and a baby born in June 1930, I am settled down to what I hope to be the beginning of a novelist’s career. I hope the awkward apprenticeship with all its errors is nearly done.

Biographical note on Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) continued to be a prolific writer, but none of his later writings equalled the success or stature of his chiefworks of the twenties. After his divorce from his second wife in 1942, Sinclair Lewis lived chiefly in Europe. His later novels include Ann Vickers (I933), It Can’t Happen Here (1935), The Prodigal Parents (1938), Gideon Planish (1943), Cass Timberlane (1945), Kingsblood Royal ( 1947), The God-Seeker (1949), and World So Wide (1951). From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis 1919-1930 was published in 1952, one year after his death in Rome.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Sinclair Lewis died on January 10, 1951."

2. Background from {[https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/sinclair-lewis-biography]}
"Sinclair Lewis Biography
"Sinclair Lewis, 1885-1951
Author of Main Street"
The above is the inscription on an unpretentious marker in the cemetery of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. It is the middle stone of three, for the famous son is buried between his father, Dr. E. J. Lewis, and his mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, who died when Harry, as he was then called, was six years old. The surmise that the name Sinclair was assumed later while Lewis was connected with the Utopian schemes of Upton Sinclair is incorrect. Dr. Lewis named his son at birth in honor of a friend, Dr. Sinclair, a New Lisbon, Wisconsin, dentist. In adult life, Lewis was known to his friends as "Red."
Behind the graves is the granite family monument. There is no mention of Sinclair Lewis' other twenty novels or of the fact that he was the first American novelist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet Sauk Centre, scorned by Lewis in his lifetime, now has a Sinclair Lewis Avenue and "The Original Main Street." The library is collecting manuscripts and relics that were not willed, like his library and his Nobel Prize medal, to Yale University. It was at Lewis' own request that his ashes were returned to Sauk Centre after his death in Rome, January 10, 1951.
Main Street began as a story to be called "The Village Virus," a study which was completed in 1905 but never published. Carl Van Doren says that the novel itself was written years later, in Washington D. C. Although the reaction of Sauk Centre toward the book was at first unfavorable, there is no evidence that it was ever banned from the local library. John Steinbeck, about fifteen years younger than Lewis and an admirer of the older writer, tells in Travels With Charley (1960) of trying to find the way to Sauk Centre from St. Paul. A waitress directed him, adding, "They got a sign up. I guess quite a few folks come to see it. It does the town some good." The cook volunteered that he didn't think "what's-his-name" was there any more. Steinbeck had read Main Street when he was in high school, and he remembered "the violent hatred it aroused in the countryside of his (Lewis') nativity." The last time the two authors had met, Lewis had complained to Steinbeck of being "always cold" and had spoken of going to Italy. He never returned alive. "Now he's good for the town," Steinbeck comments. "Brings in some tourists. He's a good writer now."
Sauk Centre was, in the 1880s, a bare, unlovely town only thirty years old, which did not become a city until 1889. The year of Sinclair Lewis' birth, the population of the village and town combined was 2807. Surrounded by prairie farming land dotted with thirty of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes, the town was nevertheless drab and uninviting. In summer, the temperature might rise to 110 degrees; in winter, it could dip to 40 below zero.
An indifferent, poorly adjusted, and awkward youngster, Harry Lewis was seventeenth in a class of eighteen in the eighth grade. At the age of thirteen, when he tried to enlist as a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War, he was promptly apprehended by his father. In high school he improved, taking part in debating and other forms of public speaking. In 1903, when he was in the academy of Oberlin College preparing for Yale, he described himself as "Tall, ugly, thin, red-haired, but not, methinks, especially stupid." He was a misfit at Yale, although he was editor of Literary Magazine and worked on New Haven newspapers. He dropped out of college before graduation.
After more than a year of temporary jobs, which included editing, writing children's verses for magazines, and going to Panama by steerage in search of work on the canal, he returned to Yale in 1907 and received his degree in 1908. Well-read in the English classics and experienced in freelance writing, Lewis during the next four years held positions as editor, reporter, manuscript reader, advertising manager, and reviewer. His first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane, published under the pseudonym of "Tom Graham," appeared in 1912, to be followed by Our Mr. Wrenn in 1914, the year of his marriage to Grace Livingstone Hegger.
This marriage, detailed by the first Mrs. Lewis in Half a Loaf and With Love from Gracie, was to last fourteen years, ending in divorce in 1928. This period of time included the birth and childhood of a son, Wells, born in 1917 and killed by a sniper in Alsace during World War II (1944). These years also embraced Lewis' rise to fame, beginning with the publishing of his earlier novels: The Trail of the Hawk, The Job, The Innocents, and Free Air. Lewis reached a high level in 1920 with the appearance of Main Street. Other successful volumes followed: Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Elmer Gantry (1927); The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928); and Dodsworth (1929). Lewis declined the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, since he did not feel that the book represented the more favorable side of American life and culture. As a realist, he wanted to be free to criticize rather than to flatter.
After his divorce from his first wife, Lewis married Dorothy Thompson, widely known foreign correspondent and newspaper columnist. The next year (1929), Dodsworth was published, and Lewis began research on a labor novel, which was never completed, despite repeated efforts. The year 1930 marked the birth of Lewis' second son, Michael, and the awarding of the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature for Babbitt. This time Lewis accepted the prize, which amounted to nearly $50,000. He had won, whether deservedly or not, over such literary giants as Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Hergesheimer, Upton Sinclair, and two women novelists who were literary artists: Ellen Glasgow, an American, and Rebecca West, of England. Lewis traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize, the first American writer to be thus honored. This was a fitting climax to Lewis' great decade, the 1920s, beginning with Main Street and ending with the highest recognition in the literary world.
The twenties, peak years of the Lewis career, were those of prohibition, jazz, big business, speakeasies, bathtub gin, and general recklessness — an aftermath of World War I. The grand climax was the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the great depression of the 1930s. The year 1933 brought repeal of prohibition, lengthening breadlines, and widespread unemployment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933 and remained in office until his death in 1945. Lewis declined in popularity, although the process was slow.
Ann Vickers appeared in 1933, and It Can't Happen Here, written as a result of his knowledge of conditions abroad, particularly in Germany, was published in 1936. Much of the information used in this novel was acquired from Dorothy Thompson, who was an authority on European affairs. It was also in 1936 that Yale awarded Lewis an honorary degree. In 1938, The Prodigal Parents appeared, as well as a play, Angela Is Twenty-two, in which Lewis himself acted. In 1942, he and Dorothy Thompson were divorced, after a separation of nearly five years. Lewis later became involved with a young actress, Marcella Powers.
Four novels appeared during the 1940s: Gideon Planish (1943); Cass Timberlane (1945); Kingsblood Royal (1947); and The God-Seeker (1949). World So Wide was published posthumously in 1951. Dr. Claude Lewis thought that heavy drinking shortened his brother's life, possibly by ten years. In accordance with his wishes, Lewis' ashes were returned to Sauk Centre for burial. His famous divorced wife, Dorothy Thompson, outlived him by ten years, dying in Lisbon in 1961. A year before her death, she had taken her three-year-old grandson, Gregory Lewis, and his mother to Sauk Centre to visit the grave of the town's most celebrated native, Sinclair Lewis."

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He wrote some great plays