LEWIS, SINCLAIR

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was one of the leading U.S. novelists of the 1920s. He was a social critic of the era who wrote from the political perspective of Progressivism. Lewis wrote some of the most effective mass-market criticism against the business corruption of society. He was a fierce critic of materialism in the United States. In books such as Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Mainstreet, Lewis attacked the smug provincialism, social conformity, and corrupt business values of the U.S. middle class in the 1920s.

Lewis was born on February 7, 1885 in a prairie village in the most Scandinavian part of the United States—Sauk Center, Minn. He was raised in middle class circumstances and attended the local public schools of his community. Lewis grew up in the midst of the Progressive movement in the United States. Many of his Scandinavian neighbors embraced cooperative and socialist ideas, and had embraced unionization and progressive thinking in various ways. Other neighbors of his were middle-class Protestants who strictly conformed to the social standards they deemed acceptable and who saw financial advancement as the major yardstick of success. Lewis grew up with conflicting feelings about himself. He wanted to be a "regular guy," but he was by nature a non-conformist, an agnostic, a skeptic, and an artist.

Lewis enrolled at Yale University in Connecticut because he hoped to escape Midwestern life. He then began an off-and-on career as a student and world traveler. He graduated from Yale in 1908. Recounting his life to the Nobel Foundation after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 Sinclair wrote: "I drifted for 2 years after college as a journalist, as a newspaper reporter in Iowa and in San Francisco, and incredibly, as a junior editor of a magazine for teachers of the deaf."

Lewis wrote five novels between 1914 and 1919, and according to him "all of them dead before the ink was dry." In 1920 at the age of 35 Lewis published the novel Mainstreet. It became an instant and scandalous best-seller, largely because he had attacked "one of the most treasured American myths . . . that all American towns were peculiarly noble and happy," as Lewis himself said.

Lewis wrote for mass-audiences and usually criticized class values and virtues. He challenged the smug, narrow-minded, and complacent "business values" of mainstreet United States. He became one of the literary voices that indirectly spoke to the issues of Progressive political thinking in the United States. Lewis saw the modernized world of the 1920s change the United States; he saw great problems looming in the near future. He wrote about those people in the United States who had blinded themselves to the perils of smug, small-town thinking.

Lewis' work flourished in the 1920s. It was a perfect era to indict traditional U.S. values, which had become unacceptable in the young, jaded, sophisticated, and cynical urban climate of the so-called "Jazz Age," as the era of the 1920s was called. The generation that had just witnessed the mechanized slaughter and meaninglessness of World War I (1914–1918) was ready for Lewis' books. His writing was welcomed as a refreshing statement of the unvarnished truth—it rejected genteel optimism, blind U.S. nationalism, and traditional religious values.

Lewis continued writing novels after he received the Nobel Prize; his other works included It Can't Happen Here, Cass Timberlane, and an early civil rights advocacy novel, Kingsblood Royal (1947). He never reclaimed the status he achieved in the 1920s as a critic of business-related pomposity.

Lewis' critical faculty was compared to that of Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and Mark Twain (1835–1910). He was regarded as a gadfly of the literary scene in the United States. Lewis both outraged and educated average citizens about their frequently misguided lives as hucksters of U.S. business. His impact on the business world of his era was large, complex, and thoughtful.

LEWIS, SINCLAIR

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