Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was born and raised in a small town in Minnesota. He attended Yale University, where he began writing for the university literary magazine, and then spent several years working as an editor and journalist around the U.S. in order to fund his dream of writing novels. While his first five novels did not sell widely, his sixth, Main Street (1920), was an instant bestseller. This novel, which satirizes the life of Lewis’s native small town, turned Lewis into a national celebrity. His next two novels, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), were also spectacularly successful satires about American middle-class life. Lewis would continue publishing novels for two more decades and his work was still very popular, but none of his fifteen later novels approached the wild popularity of these three early novels. Still, the early novels were influential enough to win Lewis the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, making him the first American to do so. Lewis divorced his first wife, the editor Grace Livingston Hegger, in 1925 and married his second, the reporter Dorothy Thompson, three years later. Thompson became one of the first prominent women in American journalism, and she was the first American journalist forced out of Nazi Germany by Hitler’s regime. In fact, her research in Germany was the basis for It Can’t Happen Here, and the farm where she and Lewis lived in Barnard, Vermont starting in 1928 was the model for Doremus Jessup’s farm in the town of Fort Beulah. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis descended into serious alcoholism, divorced Thompson, and continued to write, including briefly in Hollywood. He died of alcohol-related illness in 1951. While Lewis was undoubtedly among the most popular novelists of his generation, his work is read less and less frequently today—although his social criticism is still relevant, and there was a significant resurgence of interest in It Can’t Happen Here after the 2016 presidential election.