He worked in publishing during the day and spent his evenings writing short stories and novels. His first book, a boys’ adventure story titled Hike and the Aeroplane, was published in 1912.

In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger and the couple moved to Port Washington, on Long Island. Lewis became editor and advertising manager at the George H. Doran Publishing Company. He continued to devote his evenings to writing fiction, and when the publication of a story in the Saturday Evening Post proved lucrative, Lewis quit his job to become a full-time novelist.

The 1920 publication of Main Street marked the beginning of Lewis’s international acclaim as a satirical novelist. An instant best-seller, Main Street sold more than 250,000 copies by the end of its first year of publication. Lewis quickly followed this success with several other well-received novels—Babbitt (1922), about an unhappy businessman wanting more in his life; Arrowsmith (1925), about an idealistic doctor and researcher; and Elmer Gantry (1927), a send-up of an evangelical scam artist. In 1926 Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith. He declined to accept the prize, stating that his novel did not meet the “wholesome” standards of the committee.

Lewis married the well-known journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1928, having divorced his first wife, Grace, earlier that year. He spent the next several years writing and traveling between the United States and Europe. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lewis’s reputation declined in succeeding years. After the publication of The Prodigal Parents (1938), he was never able to draw the wide readership of his earlier days. His marriage to Dorothy Thompson ended in divorce in 1942, and he spent the last years of his life in Europe, alone and suffering from alcoholism and ill health. On January 10, 1951, Harry Sinclair Lewis died of a heart attack in Rome at the age of sixty-five. He is buried in Minnesota.

THE WORLD OF SINCLAIR LEWIS
AND BABBITT

1885 Harry Sinclair Lewis is born on February 7 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Dr. Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis.
1891 His mother dies of tuberculosis. A year later his father marries Isabel Warner.
1902 Lewis enrolls at Oberlin Academy in Ohio.
1903- 1906 Lewis attends Yale University, where he contributes to the Yale Literary Magazine. He spends two summers working on cattle boats that sail between America and England.
1906 Lewis leaves Yale for a brief stay at Helicon Hall, a utopian community in Englewood, New Jersey, founded by the writer Upton Sinclair.
1908 He returns to Yale and graduates.
1908- 1910 Lewis travels around the United States working as a freelance newspaper reporter. In 1910 he moves to New York City, where he lands a job working in a publishing house for $15 a week.
1912 Lewis’s first book, a boys’ adventure story entitled Hike and the Aeroplane, is published under the pseudonym Tom Graham.
1914 Lewis marries Grace Livingston Hegger, an active philanthropist and editor at Vogue, and moves to Port Washington, New York. He works as an editor and advertising manager at the George H. Doran Publishing Company, and devotes his evenings to writing novels. His first adult novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, is published.
1915 The Trail of the Hawk is published. In late fall, Lewis receives a check for $500 from the Saturday Evening Post for one of his stories. Finally able to make a living from freelance writing , Lewis resigns from the Doran Company to travel across the country with his wife.
1917 Lewis and Grace visit Sauk Centre several times over the year, and Lewis begins gathering notes for Main Street. The United States declares war on Germany on April 2. Lewis’s first son, Wells, is born. The Job and The Innocents are published.
1919 Free Air is published. Lewis’s play Hobohemia is staged in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
1920 The fall publication of Main Street establishes Lewis’s reputation as a satirical novelist. The novel is his first commercial success and becomes a best-seller, with 250,000 copies sold by the year’s end. Lewis is listed in Who’s Who in America.
1921 In January, Lewis collaborates with Harvey O’Higgins and Harriet Ford on the dramatization of Main Street, which opens in October at the National Theatre (now the Nederlander Theatre) in New York.
1922 Babbitt is published, and the term “Babbittry” enters the language as a synonym for conformism and complacent commercialism.