In , he left his job and began to travel extensively with his wife. His marriage to Grace ended in divorce in , and the only child of their union, their son Wells, was killed overseas during World War II. Prizewinning work In , Lewis was finally recognized as a serious author with the publication of his novel, Main Street , based on his home town of Sauk Center. In , he published Arrowsmith , a novel about an idealistic doctor.
That work won him the Pulitzer Prize, but he turned it down. Lewis used the occasion of his acceptance of the award in Stockholm to respond with a broad criticism of the Academy itself. After noting the major intellectual and artistic stars that were not members, he remarked: It might be answered that, after all, the Academy is limited to fifty members; that, naturally, it cannot include everyone of merit.
But the fact is that while most of our few giants are excluded, the Academy does have room to include three extraordinarily bad poets, two very melodramatic and insignificant playwrights, two gentlemen who are known only because they are university presidents, a man who was thirty years ago known as a rather clever humorous draftsman, and several gentlemen of whom -- I sadly confess my ignorance -- I have never heard.
Main Street , published late in , was my first novel to rouse the embattled peasantry and, as I have already hinted, it had really a success of scandal.
One of the most treasured American myths had been that all American villages were peculiarly noble and happy, and here an American attacked that myth. Some hundreds of thousands read the book with the same masochistic pleasure that one has in sucking an aching tooth.
The next novel, yet unnamed, will concern idealism in America through three generations, from till an idealism which the outlanders who call Americans «dollar-chasers» do not understand. My first marriage, to Grace Hegger, in New York, in , had been dissolved. During these years of novelwriting since , I have lived a quite unromantic and unstirring life.
That, however, would be a typical error of biography. The fact is that my foreign travelling has been a quite uninspired recreation, a flight from reality. My real travelling has been sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States, with their friendliness to strangers and their rough teasing, their passion for material advancement and their shy idealism, their interest in all the world and their boastful provincialism — the intricate complexities which an American novelist is privileged to portray.
I hope the awkward apprenticeship with all its errors is nearly done. Sinclair Lewis continued to be a prolific writer, but none of his later writings equalled the success or stature of his chiefworks of the twenties. After his divorce from his second wife in , Sinclair Lewis lived chiefly in Europe.
Interview 2. Favorite Recipes. Scholarly Essays. Three major characteristics define Lewis's work: detail, satire, and realism. Lewis remarkably portrays ordinary life, ordinary characters, and ordinary speech. Many critics, including Heywood Broun, praised Lewis for his ability to meticulously reproduce different dialects and speech.
Lewis used vivid detail to create scenes of the American middle class. His social satire was critical of American life and certain types of Americans and institutions which he felt harmed Americans and prevented the country from living up to its democratic ideals. Lewis's novels fit under the umbrella of American social fiction, fiction whose primary purpose is to represent contemporary American society, primarily in a realist style with realistic language. Lewis artfully described American culture and life of the time, helping Americans see their own lives with their many flaws.
Critics praised him, claiming that his writing represented the culture of the s and s. Mark Schorer, in his exhaustive biography, notes regarding Lewis's work, "American culture seems always to have had a literary spokesman, a single writer who presented American culture and American attitudes toward its culture, to the world"
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