Sinclair Lewis – Biography of Sinclair Lewis

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Harry Sinclair Lewis Born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, on February 7, 1885, he was the third child of Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis. His father, grandfather, and older brother were all small-town doctors. Lewis he was a lonely and clumsy boy who liked to read. He began writing in high school, and some of his articles appeared in the Sauk Center newspapers. After high school Lewis he left Minnesota to study at Yale University in Connecticut, interrupting his studies in 1907 to work briefly at Helicon Hall, a socialist colony in New Jersey, established by the writer Upton Sinclair. Following his graduation in 1908, he spent several years working for newspapers in various parts of the United States. His first four novels did not get much impact.

In 1920 Lewis achieved immediate recognition around the world with the publication of Main Street, the story of a vivacious young woman married to a rather older and boring village doctor, who tries to bring culture and imagination closer to the empty life of the small town. Then, Lewis focused on the american businessman in Babbitt (1922), perhaps his most important work, written in a fantastic style and ignoring the development of the formal plot or structure. The creation of George F. Babbitt, an intellectually empty, immature man of weak morals who nevertheless remains a comical and lovable figure, is the greatest achievement of Lewis.

His next novel, Arrowsmith (1925), returned to the style of Main Street portraying the struggle of a young doctor to maintain his dignity in a small and dishonest world. Despite his simplistic view of science as a means of saving his own soul, this novel was offered the Pulitzer Prize. LewisHowever, he immediately rejected the honor because the award was awarded not for being a work of value, but for being a work that presented “the healthy atmosphere of American life“.

Elmer gantry (1927), is an attack on religious hypocrisy. Dodsworth (1929), the comprehensive description of a wealthy manufacturer in pursuit of happiness in Europe, was more successful. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis He became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but this honor brought him little personal happiness.

Lewis he wrote a great deal in the following years, but none of these works were as successful as his earlier works. Ann vickers (1933) traces the trajectory of an unstable woman who begins as a social worker and ends as a lover of a politician; Cass timberlane (1945) deals with an unhappy marriage between a middle-aged judge and his loving wife; Kingsblood Royal (1947) addresses the issue of racial prejudice; Y The God-Seeker (1949) tells the story of a New England missionary’s attempts to convert Minnesota’s Native Americans in the 1840s.

Lewis He spent his later years traveling throughout Europe, unable to find publishers for his work and aware that his impact on American literature was far less than what his early fans had led him to believe. Lewis it was overshadowed by other American authors, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Critics later also considered that the Nobel Prize he had won in 1930 should have gone to the strongest novelist Theodore Dreiser.

Married and divorced twice, in recent years he has almost completely retired. Increasingly self-conscious about his physical decline, he refused to be seen even by his few friends. He died on January 10, 1951, of a heart attack in a clinic in a small town outside of Rome, Italy. Although it is not considered that Lewis have been a great writer, your place in the history of American literature is assured.