Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis (February 7th 1885 - January 10th 1951) is a Romancier and American Dramaturge . Its novels are a satire of the Bourgeoisie and its mercantile and religious concerns.

He received the Nobel Prize of literature in 1930.

Biography

Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7th, 1885 in Sauk Center, in the Minnesota. He is the son of a country doctor. His/her mother died in 1891, her father remaria then. During all its childhood, he dreams only of voyages and adventures, in order to escape the life choking from his small town. He made his studies with Oberlin College in Ohio and with the Université Yale, on the east coast of the United States, and was graduate in 1908. He then put himself to travel in the United States and even to Panama until in 1915, writing poems and news and working for publishers. He at that time attends several writers of tendency of left, like Upton Sinclair, Jack London and the journalist John Reed.

Its first novels are poor, and he saw news with the optimistic tone published in reviews with great pulling like Collier' S and the Saturday Evening Post. Any exchange for him in 1920 whereas its novel Hand Street , a sour criticism of the life in the small towns of the American Mid-West inspired of its youth with Sauk Center (disguised under the name of “Gopher Meadow”), becomes a true phenomenon of edition, more than 100,000 specimens being sold in four months. The novel is largest Livre with success of the first quarter century in the United States, and is also encensé by criticism.

Lewis will continue in this vein during the following years, becoming the leader of the realistic school American. Its following novel, Babbitt , published in 1922, is him also traditional immediately recognized as tel. It puts in scene George F. Babbitt, prosperous real estate agent, pillar of the chamber of commerce of the town of Zenith, obsessed by the material values, but which recognizes sometimes that its life centered on the money and consumption is incomplete. The novel presents the first portrait of America of the years 1920 obsessed by the speculations and the acquisition of accessible objects from now on like the cars, refrigerators, and so on, but which is unaware of completely art and the literature.

In 1926, the Prix Pulitzer is decreed to him for Arrowsmith , a novel putting in scene a young idealistic doctor confronted with a as avid profession of money and prestige as the medium of the Babbitt businesses. Lewis refuses the price, under pretext which it should be granted to a text emphasizing positive qualities of America, and not with a critical novel like his. Behind this refusal, one can also see a remainder of bitterness vis-a-vis the decision to have seen this price escaping to him in 1921, whereas the committee of attribution prefers the Age of innocence of Edith Wharton with Main Street . It should be said that the decision was not obvious, the two books with the years having confirmed their place among the great classics of the American novel. Lewis does not want any resentment with Wharton itself, and him dedication Babbitt the following year.

Sinclair Lewis publishes two other great classics during the following years, Elmer Gantry in 1927, the history of a former player of American football become itinerant preacher and who builds an empire using the radiophonic waves, in spite of leaning for the bottle and a life far from being exemplary. It thus anticipates half-century a reality which will become impossible to circumvent in the United States. The history is inspired by that of Billy Sunday, ex-player high-speed motorboat of baseball, which became preacher protesting the most famous of its time to the turning of the XXe century. The last traditional novel of Lewis is Dodsworth published in 1929, which tells the history of an American couple on a journey in Europe whereas their marriage cracks of all shares.

It receives the Nobel Prize of literature in 1930 and is then the first American with being honoured with this reward. He is then the American novelist most famous in the world, and all its novels are the subject of film adaptations putting in the high-speed motorboat the largest stars of the time. However, the value of its novels will drop starting from this date, and its post-Nobel production, only It Can' T Happen Here (“That cannot arrive here”), a novel on a fascistic coup d'etat in the United States, approaches the quality of its works of the years 1920, but in another vein. The sales of its novels drop in a significant way, whereas Lewis carries out an unstable life, travelling of hotel room in hotel room and devoting themselves to drink. It Marie and divorce twice during her life. It had two wire thus: Wells, which are killed in France during the Second world war, and Michael.

Sinclair dies the January 10th 1951 with Rome, at the time of one of its many voyages. It is buried in its birthplace.

Random links: