biography
| name: |
Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1885–1951)
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| biography:
| Writer, born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, USA. He studied at Yale (1903–6), left to join Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in New Jersey, then returned and completed his studies at Yale (1908). For the next few years he worked as a journalist, editor, and free-lance writer in San Francisco, Washington, DC, and New York City, but by 1916 he was devoting himself to his own writing, which would fall into three distinct periods. His first novels and short stories (all eminently forgettable) were a search for subject matter and a style. His second phase, essentially the 1920s, produced virtually all his important works, several of which provided names that would become proverbial stereotypes: Main Street (1920), a satirical portrait of a conservative small town in the Midwest; Babbitt (1922), equally satirical in its portrait of a conservative American businessman; Elmer Gantry (1927), also satirical in its portrait of religious hypocrisy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925) but refused it because he felt his views of American life did not conform to the idealized view of America espoused by the Pulitzer panel. He did, however, accept the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), the first American so honoured. His fiction thereafter went into marked decline on the literary scale, although in such works as It Can't Happen Here (1935) and Kingsblood Royal (1947), he did anticipate certain social issues. He was married (1928–42) to the journalist, Dorothy Thompson, but theirs was a stormy relationship, aggravated by his severe alcoholism. He spent the last two decades of his life travelling around the USA and Europe and died in Rome, as though avoiding the one place he truly knew, the American Midwest. |
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