Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [2]
Lewis’s reputation declined in succeeding years. After the publication of The Prodigal Parents (1938), he was never able to draw the wide readership of his earlier days. His marriage to Dorothy Thompson ended in divorce in 1942, and he spent the last years of his life in Europe, alone and suffering from alcoholism and ill health. On January 10, 1951, Harry Sinclair Lewis died of a heart attack in Rome at the age of sixty-five. He is buried in Minnesota.
THE WORLD OF SINCLAIR LEWIS AND MAIN STREET
1885 Harry Sinclair Lewis is born on February 7 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Dr. Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis.
1891 His mother dies of tuberculosis. A year later his father marries Isabel Warner.
1902 Lewis enrolls at Oberlin Academy in Ohio.
1903- 1906 - Lewis attends Yale University, where he contributes to the Yale Literary Magazine. He spends two summers working on cattle boats that sail between America and England.
1906 Lewis leaves Yale for a brief stay at Helicon Hall, a utopian community in Englewood, New Jersey, founded by the writer Upton Sinclair.
1908 He returns to Yale and graduates.
1908- 1910 Lewis travels around the United States working as a freelance newspaper reporter. In 1910 he moves to New York City, where he lands a job working in a publishing house for $15 a week.
1912 Lewis’s first book, a boys’ adventure story entitled Hike and the Aeroplane, is published under the pseudonym Tom Graham.
1914 Lewis marries Grace Livingston Hegger, an active philanthropist and editor at Vogue, and moves to Port Washington, New York. He works as an editor and advertising manager at the George H. Doran Publishing Company, and devotes his evenings to writing novels. His first adult novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, is published.
1915 The Trail of the Hawk is published. In late fall, Lewis receives a check for $500 from the Saturday Evening Post for one of his stories. Finally able to make a living from freelance writing, Lewis resigns from the Doran Company to travel across the country with his wife.
1917 Lewis and Grace visit Sauk Centre several times over year, and Lewis begins gathering notes for Main Street. The United States declares war on Germany on April 2. Lewis’s first son, Wells, is born. The Job and The Innocents are published.
1919 Free Air is published. Lewis’s play Hobohemia is staged in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
1920 The fall publication of Main Street establishes Lewis’s reputation as a satirical novelist. The novel is his first commercial success and becomes a best-seller, with 250,000 copies sold by the year’s end. Lewis is listed in Who’s Who in America.
1921 In January, Lewis collaborates with Harvey O’Higgins and Harriet Ford on the dramatization of Main Street, which opens in October at the National Theatre (now the Nederlander Theatre) in New York.
1922 Babbitt is published, and the term “Babbittry” enters the language as a synonym for conformism and complacent commercialism. The Hollywood film version of Free Air is released.
1923 A silent film version of Main Street is released.
1925 Arrowsmith, which Lewis dedicates to the American novelist Edith Wharton, is published.
1926 Mantrap is published. Lewis is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, but declines it.
1927 Elmer Gantry is published. Lewis postpones a planned autobiographical book and sets sail for Europe.
1928 The Man Who Knew Coolidge is published. Lewis and Grace Hegger divorce. In England he marries Dorothy Thompson, the central European correspondent and bureau chief of the New York Evening Post. He moves to a 290-acre farm in Barnard, Vermont, spending the winters in New York and traveling intermittently to London, Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow.
1929 Dodsworth is published.
1930 Lewis becomes the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His second son, Michael, is born in June.
1931 A film version of Arrowsmith