Karaganda RURL

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He began his career as a journalist and, like O. Henry and Sherwood Anderson, studied the life and customs of provincial America well. Lewis acted as the author of works typical of the beginning of the 20th century about a stubborn and enterprising loner, a native of the very bottom.

The most famous works of the mature and late period of his work: “Main Street”, “Baby”, “It Can't Happen Here”. Sinclair Lewis was born February 7, 1885 in Sock Center (Minnesota, USA), in the family of a rural doctor. Early addicted to reading. In 1902 he graduated from high school. The father did not object to his son studying at Yale University after a six-month preparatory course at Oberlin College. In Oberlin and New Haven, Lewis tried to engage in religion and poetry. Having finally despaired, in 1906, at the very beginning of his graduation course, he dropped out of school and decided for a short while at E. Sinclair's utopian colony in Inglewood (pc. New Jersey). In New York, changing his occupations, he tried for almost a year to lead the life of a free writer. After a hopeless attempt to get a job in Panama, where the canal was being built, Lewis returned to college and graduated from it in 1908 with a meager allowance from his father. Sinclair worked as a journalist, lived for some time in a colony of artists in Carmel (California). Here, he met writers George Sterling and Jack London. Lewis sold his ideas to Jack London, and he wrote several stories on them. Lewis changed several jobs, until in 1910 he got a job as an editor in New York. In 1913, he completed his first novel, “Our Mr.Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man”, which was published in February 1914. After him, without much success, four more novels followed. In 1914, Lewis got married to Grace Livingston Hegger, and they had a son. After 14 years, Lewis divorced and married journalist Dorothy Thompson, who became the mother of his second son. Lewis divorced his second wife in 1942. In 1915, the “Saturday Evening Post” paid Lewis a 1000 dollars for the story “Nature”. This was a major success. Literary activity has now become the main occupation for Lewis. Over the next four years, his works “The Job: An American Novel” (1917), “Free Air” (1919), “Main Street” (1920), “Babbitt” (1922), “Arrowsmith” (1925), “Elmer Gantry”, “Dodsworth” (1929), “Ann Vickers” (1933). In Washington in 1920, Lewis completed his most important novel, Main Street, whose incredible success was among the most sensational events in the history of book publishing in the United States. In the next decade, Sinclair Lewis published several more novels that attracted the attention of a huge audience. Thanks to works of a very wide satirical range, Lewis became one of the largest writers in the history of American literature. In 1927, he refused the Pulitzer Prize, and at the end of 1930 became the first American Nobel Prize winner in literature. Sinclair Lewis died in Rome on January 10, 1951.