Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was an American novelist, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a doctor. After Yale and years of hack work for publishers and magazines, he wrote five novels, including The Trail of the Hawk, before Main Street in 1920 made him famous with its satire of small-town complacency. Babbitt followed in 1922, Arrowsmith, for which he refused the Pulitzer Prize, in 1925, Elmer Gantry in 1927 and Dodsworth in 1929, and in 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It Can't Happen Here imagined a fascist takeover of the United States. He died in Rome after years of heavy drinking.