Sinclair Lewis's American Satires

About Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930) and the defining satirist of 1920s American society — a writer whose targets were the complacent businessman (Babbitt), the provincial small town (Main Street), the compromised idealist (Arrowsmith), the fraudulent evangelist (Elmer Gantry), and the corporate executive abroad (Dodsworth). Babbitt (1922), his masterwork, gave the English language a common noun for the conformist businessman; Main Street (1920) preceded it as his breakthrough. Lewis declined the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926, objecting to the prize's criteria. He accepted the Nobel in 1930, the first American to do so. His later career declined — he was never again as sharp or as culturally central as he was in the 1920s.