Almanac of Story Tellers: Sinclair Lewis

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of January 10th.

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    It is the 10th day of the year, leaving 355 days remaining in 2022. 

    On this date in 1951, Sinclair Lewis, the American writer, satirist, and social critic, died in Italy.

    The story telling in his novels took on complacent businessmen,  predatory preachers, pompous intellectuals, and American provincialism.

    He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, the first American so honored. His novel Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer prize in 1926, but Lewis declined the award.

     In what is perhaps his best known book, It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935, Lewis imagined a fascist takeover of the United States by a egotistical candidate who won election as president by promoting fear and promising a return to traditional American values.

   

    Most recently, the book once again became a best seller when its comparison to recent politics in the United States did not go unrecognized.

    But during his lifetime, Lewis's earlier novels, including Main Street, Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, were far more popular and considered to be stronger, better written novels.

    When it first came out, It Can't Happen Here was more often compared to Huey Long, a U.S. senator and former governor from Louisiana who was again running for governor as a populist Democrat. Long, often denounced as a demagouge, was assassinated before the book was published.