Sinclair lewis essay

In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

Early career. Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift -style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Sinclair Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915)...

Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewis later became an atheist.

Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920. His biographer Mark Schorer wrote that the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history".