Lewis, Sinclair (1885–1951), novelist.Although he attended Yale, Harry Sinclair Lewis, a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, always remained something of a provincial midwesterner. Deeply insecure about his personal appearance, ill at ease among intellectuals, prone to alcoholic binges, and in and out of well‐publicized marriages, he remains a perennial critical problem, an uncouth realist in an age of uncertain modernism. Perhaps the most gifted mimic in American letters, he was best at seeming to caricature small‐town businessmen and religious hucksters.
Although cosmopolitan eastern critics such as H.L.
Mencken assumed that he shared their scorn at the cultural wasteland west of the Hudson River, Lewis in fact was deeply sympathetic to those he only appeared to satirize.
Main Street (1920), loosely based on Sauk Centre, and
Babbitt (1922), about a Republican real‐estate broker in the fictional midwestern city of Zenith, entered the language as generic terms for the aridity of American culture and the emptiness of business values. Both novels became best‐sellers, securing Lewis's reputation and epitomizing the post–
World War I mood of cynicism and condescension toward rural and provincial America. Almost as popular were
Arrowsmith (1925), on the pressures that constricted a career devoted to medical research;
Elmer Gantry (1927), featuring a flamboyantly hypocritical touring evangelist; and
Dodsworth (1929), about the impact of European values and behavior patterns on a seemingly conventional business couple.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, Lewis won a huge following abroad, as foreigners saw in his work some essence of capitalist democracy. His later works, dealing with social problems, included
Ann Vickers (1933), on gender issues,
It Can't Happen Here (1935), on fascism; and
Kingsblood Royal (1947), on race and miscegenation. Sinclair Lewis remains a somewhat ambiguous observer of American mores, a critic of bourgeois life who was deeply implicated in its consumer values and
advertising techniques.
See also
Literature: Since World War I;
Twenties, The;
Urbanization.
Bibliography
Mark Schorer , Sinclair Lewis, 1961.
Christopher P. Wilson , White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925, 1992.
Robert M. Crunden
