LEWIS, SINCLAIR (1885— ), American author, was born at Sauk Center, Minn., on Feb. 7, 1885. He graduated from Yale university in 1907, and was for a time a reporter, afterward serving in an editorial capacity for several publishing houses and magazines. At this time he began to write fiction, but his work, in spite of the promise of Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), the The Trail of the Hawk (i9i5), attracted little attention. His reputation was made by Main Street (1920), a novel satirizing both the narrow ness of life in the Main streets of the Middle West and the hollow ness of a superficial intellectualism that despised Main street without having anything better to offer. Main Street was born of the new mood of national self-consciousness which followed the World War, and became a text for attacks upon provincialism from coast to coast. In 1922, Lewis published Babbitt, a study of the complacent American, whose individuality had been sucked out of him by rotary clubs, business ideals and general conformity. The name Babbitt promptly passed into general usage, and it is probable that this novel had more effect upon public consciousness than any other written in English in this decade. Babbitt is not only Lewis's most important novel, but it is, so far, his best.
He followed this success with Arrowsmith (1924), a satiric study of the medical profession, with emphasis upon the frustration of fine scientific ideals. His next book, Elmer Gantry (1927), was more violent, a pamphleteering attack upon the ignorant, gross and predatory leaders who had crept into the Protestant Church.
It is perhaps a reflection of the animosity aroused in many Ameri can minds by the enforcement of prohibition and the political manoeuvering by religious bodies that accompanied it. While it aroused wide controversy, it is far less successful as a work of art and as sheer story than the earlier books. The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) is a return to the theme of Babbitt in a series of pointed monologues. Dodsworth (1929) concerns the experiences of a retired American automobile manufacturer and his wife on a European tour and offers Lewis a chance to present effectively the contrasting values and manners of Europe and America and study the reactions on the very different tempera ments of the man and his wife.
Sinclair Lewis is primarily a satirist of the people. His subject and his theme of attack is the bourgeoisie of a democracy, with their characteristic vices. He is better at caricature than at char acter, and his style, while vigorous, is seldom beautiful or refined. He has remarkable powers of observation and a gift of mimicry in dialogue that recalls Dickens whom, in other ways except in humour, he often resembles. Essentially he is a pamphleteer of genius, like H. G. Wells, but his creation of figures, instantly recognized as summaries of their period, as in the case of Babbitt, gives him a claim upon literature. In spite of his deficiencies in art, as a novelist he is an important figure in the early loth cen tury. He received the Nobel prize in literature in i93o. (H. S. C.)