A short life of the author
Harry Sinclair Lewis (7 February 1885 – 10 January 1951) was an American novelist who became, in 1930, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and who produced, in the decade of the 1920s, the most sustained and devastating satirical attack on American middle-class life ever written. His five major novels — Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929) — anatomised the provincial small town, the complacent businessman, the compromised scientist, the hypocritical evangelist, and the American abroad with a ferocity, a specificity, and a dark comic energy that made him the most widely read and most hotly debated American novelist of the interwar period.
Life
Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota — the small town that became, fictionalised as “Gopher Prairie,” the setting of Main Street. He was the son of a country doctor. He was tall, thin, red-haired, acne-scarred, and physically unprepossessing — a misfit in his small town who escaped to Yale, where he was equally misfitting but where he began writing. He worked at various journalistic and editorial jobs, published several minor novels, and then, at thirty-five, wrote Main Street, which sold 300,000 copies in its first year and made him famous.
He married twice (to Grace Hegger and then to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of the most prominent American correspondents of the 1930s and 1940s) and was a severe alcoholic whose drinking worsened steadily through the 1930s and 1940s. He died in Rome at sixty-five, of advanced alcoholism.
Main Street (1920)
Main Street is the story of Carol Kennicott, an educated, idealistic young woman who marries a small-town Minnesota doctor and discovers that the town — Gopher Prairie — is narrow, dull, complacent, and hostile to any form of cultural aspiration. Carol’s attempts to bring culture, beauty, and progressive ideas to Gopher Prairie are met with passive resistance, mockery, and the crushing weight of conformity.
The novel was one of the most discussed American books of the century. It attacked, with real venom, the mythology of the American small town — the idea that small-town America was the repository of virtue, community, and democratic values. Lewis showed it as a place of intellectual mediocrity, social tyranny, and cultural sterility.
Babbitt (1922)
Lewis’s masterpiece — and the source of the word “Babbitt,” meaning a complacent, conformist businessman — follows George F. Babbitt, a real-estate broker in the fictional midwestern city of Zenith, through his daily life of boosterism, Rotary Club speeches, business deals, and reflexive conservatism. Babbitt is a devastating portrait of the American middle class: its materialism, its intellectual emptiness, its terror of nonconformity. But Lewis is too honest to make Babbitt merely contemptible — there are moments when Babbitt dimly perceives the limitations of his life and gropes toward something better, only to retreat into the safety of convention.
Elmer Gantry (1927)
The story of a charismatic, corrupt, sexually predatory evangelical preacher who rises to the top of the American religious establishment, Elmer Gantry is Lewis’s most savage novel — a book that was denounced from pulpits across America and banned in several cities. The novel’s portrait of religious hypocrisy is unsparing, but its real target is the American willingness to be deceived by charlatans who tell people what they want to hear.
It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
Lewis’s political novel — written during the rise of European fascism — imagines a demagogic American politician named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip who wins the presidency on a populist platform and establishes a fascist dictatorship. The novel has been rediscovered and reread during every subsequent period of American political anxiety — it was a bestseller again after the 2016 presidential election.
The Nobel Prize and After
Lewis’s Nobel Prize in 1930 — the first to an American — was controversial. Many believed Theodore Dreiser, then still living, deserved it. Lewis used his acceptance speech, “The American Fear of Literature,” to attack the conservative literary establishment — particularly the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the professors who praised genteel, inoffensive fiction while ignoring writers of genuine force. The speech championed Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and Eugene O’Neill, and remains one of the sharpest critiques of American literary culture.
After the Nobel Prize, Lewis’s powers declined rapidly. He wrote a dozen more novels — Ann Vickers (1933), Work of Art (1934), Kingsblood Royal (1947), and others — but none approaches the quality of the 1920s work. Alcoholism destroyed his health and his talent. He spent his final years wandering through Europe, estranged from both his wives and his sons, writing novels that almost no one read. He died in Rome, alone, on 10 January 1951.
Critical Standing
Lewis’s reputation has declined sharply since his death. His later novels are genuinely weak. His characters are sometimes caricatures rather than people. His prose style lacks the literary distinction of his contemporaries Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. But the 1920s novels — Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth — remain vivid, important, and relevant. “Babbitt” entered the English language as a common noun. It Can’t Happen Here is rediscovered whenever American democracy feels threatened. Lewis was the first great American satirist, and his best work endures because the America he satirised endures.
Collecting Lewis
Main Street (1920, Harcourt, Brace and Howe) in first edition brings $200–$800. Babbitt (1922) brings $200–$600. Arrowsmith (1925) and Elmer Gantry (1927) bring $100–$400. Signed copies are available but not abundant.