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, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of February 7th

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    It is the 38th day of the year, leaving 327 days remaining in 2023.

   

    On this date in 1885, the novelist Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Center, Minn.

    He told his stories in satirical novels, made realistic by the use of authentic dialogue and the genuine mores and customs of the time. His descriptions of people and places was praised for being original and convincing.

    He was the first person from the Americas to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the board in 1930 citing "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

    Sinclair attended Yale University for five years, working a number of newspaper jobs and editing the Yale Literary Magazine. It was there he first published his own writings -- poems and short stories. In 1912, he published his first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane, under a pseudonym. He wrote several more novels during the teens.

    In 1920, he wrote Main Street, a satirical novel about small-town America as seen through the eyes of an young urban woman who moves to Gopher Prairie, Minn., after marriage. It was popular and well received by critics, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and since has become the textbook novel of small-town provincialism. 

    Two years later, Lewis wrote Babbitt, another satirical novel, this time about small-town boosterism and commercial culture. He continued to write satire, against evangelical preachers in Elmer Gantry, and the privileged and affluent in Dodsworth.

    Arrowsmith, about a doctor who struggles with the ethics and culture of science, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but Lewis rejected it because, he said, the Pulitzer board prized conformity over excellence.

    His 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States, had a revival in popularity during the presidency of Donald Trump.

    Lewis died in 1951.