Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born February 7, 1885, and spent his early years watching small-town Minnesota life with the eye that would later tear it apart. Between 1920 and 1935 he published six novels - Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, It Can't Happen Here - that laid bare American capitalism, materialism, and the blowhards who fed on both. He built modern working women into his pages with a care most male writers skipped, and H. L. Mencken called him "this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds" with an authentic call to the trade. The Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1930, the first for any writer from the Americas, cited for his vigorous art of description and his wit in forging new types of characters. He died January 10, 1951, having spent three decades holding a mirror up to a country that didn't always like what it saw.