Sinclair Lewis lived a life pack filled with bizarre experiences from moving all around the country to winning the Nobel Prize in 1930. Sinclair in general had a difficult and unique childhood. Growing up Sinclair had a hard time fitting in and reaching the expectations of his older brothers. Lewis would turn all his time and energy into reading and writing. Although things didn’t always come easy to him, he took his talent and ran with it and just like that he is one of the most praised authors in the 1900s.
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Center, Wisconsin, on February 7th, 1885. Lewis’s parents were Edwin J. and Emma Kermott Lewis. Sinclair was born the youngest of three sons. He lived through a transitional period in Midwestern life. In 1891 his mother, Emma, passed away of tuberculosis. Lewis’s father remarried to Isabel Warner about a year after Sinclair’s mother passed away in 1891. He saw Isabel as biologically his mother. Isabel treated Sinclair with pity and apprehensive. Harry cared nothing for sports, was not popular in school, and received little praise from his father. Claude, Sinclair’s older brother’s success help expectations to Sinclair, causing an effect on his educational goals. Growing up he was just Claude Lewis’s red-headed, kid brother. Lewis grew up with a struggling self-esteem. He hoped to be a ‘regular guy’, but he was just not a normal person. He discovered comfort in reading, and started to write normally in journals which he owned during his life. Lewis considered himself to be the ‘product of the pioneer forests and wheat fields of Minnesota’. Lewis traveled to Europe alone and met Dorothy Thompson. Soon after he granted for a split up from his first wife ,Grace, in 1928. Lewis had a son, Wells, born in 1917 but that didn’t stop him from traveling about the United States.
Harvard was Sinclair’s initial option, however his father hoped he’d go to the University of Minnesota, it appears to obtain his father who shaped the last choice in support of Yale. Lewis was attending a school in Connecticut at an attempt to leave behind his life back at home. In preparation for university, he spent some months, beginning in September 1902, at Oberlin Academy in Ohio. Especially to some extremely needing areas of the world like Africa, he had hoped to become a missionary. It is said that at the university Lewis was universally known as ‘Red’, partly because of his hair and partly because of his radical opinions. He thought of it as boring when he went back to his home town, Sauk Center, in 1905 during the summer.
Sinclair traveled to Liverpool taking off in Portland Maine, after he got a job for a short period as a server in a Harvard restaurant. His journey to Liverpool included eleven days of living in a dirty environment, consuming unsavory food, plus achieving back bursting jobs on a moving boat. In New York he found employment with the Joint Application Bureau of the Charity Organization Society and the Association for the improvement of the condition of the poor. With an income of twenty dollars weekly, Sinclair started as a junior editor for Adventure Magazine around October 1912. During his two-year period with Stokes, he was moved into publicity work, which he entered with much more zest than the comment above would have led us to anticipate.
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In the beginning of his career as an author, Lewiss’s make up stories were mediocre. It was faint and funny, barely done diving inside the gloomy areas of limited America. His one clear ambition was to write: he kept submitting contributions to the Yale Literacy Magazine and the Courant, and in March, 1904, he became the first member of his class to have something published. The book that is dedicated to his wife, Grace, was actually at Lewis’s second book. In August 1912, Stokes had published an adventure story for boys, ‘Hike and the Aeroplane’, written by Lewis under the pseudonym Tom Graham. He wrote five novels between 1914 and 1919. ‘Main Street’ (1920), Lewis’s first mature novel, caused great controversy. At age forty – six he was the author of twelve published novels and would write ten more in the final twenty years of his life. For a time, he became in the enamored of the stage, and even tried acting himself during the late 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature, and his acceptance speech was a benchmark in the history of American literature. Lewis found the Noble prize as more of a burden than an inspiration. Sinclair continued writing novels after he received the prize. After Sinclair won the prize, it turned him into the first American to be so respected in 1930. In the prosperous decorate of the 1920s, Lewis portrayed the energy, the comedy and the pathos of American commercial culture. Lewis observed big conflicts rising in the close time to come after he witnessed the improved earth of the 1920s transform the United States. Sinclair’s work flourished in the 1920s in an era called the Jazz Age. He leaned strongly and mindful study prior to printing every book, and has talent to copy so precisely the location, dialogue, and good form he addressed about he has caused several of commenters to refer to him as consummate mimic. Actually, what he called his ‘research’ made it necessary that he live like a field scientist. When checking out his books it is a crucial aspect to acknowledge the period when he created his four most honored books.
Sinclair Lewis can certainly be seen as a critic of the area in which he wrote his best novels, but he was no reformer: he does not suggest solutions. He published for a huge crowd and normally disapproving group principles and morality. His work was received as a new assertion of the raw reality. Lewis’ critical faulty was compared to that of Thomas Paine and Mark Twain. He is a satirist, somewhat sarcastic and tone even when he’s drawing the portrait of a character to be admired by the reader. Lewis was the writer of some of the most effective mass - market criticism against the business corruption of society. At the heart of all money making. He suggested there was an emptiness. Critics found that such novels as ‘Ann Vickers’ lacked Lewis’s trademark satire. His characterizations softened and became sentimentalized. No American writer before Lewis had commented on such a wide range of American types and institutions in such a precise, entertaining, and shrewd style. Sinclair had a broad complicated and mindful effect on the field universe of his period.
Unfortunately, his writing career came to an end on January 10, 1951, at age 65, Lewis passed away in an Italian hospital surrounded by strangers.
In general, Harry Sinclair Lewis lived a life that will leave a permanent footprint in America’s literature history. Thanks to great talented authors like him that helped form not only literature history but Americas history. He accomplished more in his lifetime than one would in five lifetimes. Although Lewis has passed, his work and talent will forever be respected and honored.
Bibliography
- “Commentary on Sinclair Lewis”. World War I and the Jazz age. Primary Source Media, 1999, American journey. Gale in context: High school, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ2164000497/SUIC?u=mnkwshs&sid=SUIC&xid=b55b9902 (Accessed 24 January, 2020).
- D.J. Dooley. The Art of Sinclair Lewis. University of Nebraska Press, 1967, Lincoln.
- Edythe M. McGovern, “Sinclair Lewis”. Magill’s Survey of American Literature. Edited by Frank N. Magil, Hawthorne – Laurie volume 3, Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1991, North Bellmore , New York.
- “Sinclair Lewis”. Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. Edited by Thomas Carson and Mary Bonk, Gale, 1999. Gale in context: Highschool, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1667000120/SUIC?u=mnkwshs&sid=SUIC&xid=9ec98b18 (Accesssed 24 January, 2020).
- “Lewis, Sinclair (Harry Sinclair Lewis)(1885-1951)”. Encyclopedia of American Literature. Carl Rollyson. The Modern And Postmodern period from 1915, volume III, Facts on File, Inc. 2002, New York, NY.
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