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Lewis tended to show an affectionate magnanimity toward his fictional characters, with one important exception: the recurring character based on Gracie. The portrait of Carol Kennicott, only four years into the Lewises’ marriage, is affectionate; that of Martin Arrowsmith’s shallow second wife, Joyce, is less so; the portrayal of the arch-bitch Fran, in Dodsworth (1929), shows how badly the marriage had deteriorated.

Lewis had been drinking heavily during the writing of Elmer Gantry, and had had a hard time finishing the novel, the later chapters of which show the strain. Still, the book was a sensation, with heated reviews for and against, and the phrase “Elmer Gantry,” like “Babbitt” and “Main Street,” entered the American language, in this case as a term to describe an on-the-make priest. His next novel, Dodsworth, was another success, though this time without the element of sensation. Dodsworth was a gentler tale, about a wandering American in Europe, Lewis’s contribution to the venerable novelistic tradition contrasting the Old World with the New.

Lewis and Gracie divorced in 1928, and the same year he married Dorothy Thompson, one of the most vocal and influential journalists of the century and a superstar in her own right. Dorothy had spent much of her career in Germany, and she was one of the first Americans who understood just how dangerous Hitler and the nascent Nazi movement was likely to be. Her columns in the American press voiced her antifascist beliefs, her fears about the German regime, and her worries about Communism to an America that was trying hard to retain its comfortable isolationist position.

In 1930 Lewis became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was not a universally popular decision. The “Paris bunch,” led by Hemingway, were angry that the prize should go to a realist rather than to one of the experimentalists they championed, Ezra Pound or James Joyce. Others, like Sherwood Anderson, were afraid that Lewis won because his novels, so critical of his native country, catered to the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the European prize-givers. In Lewis’s case, as in the case of many others, the Nobel proved to be a mixed blessing; while it affirmed his genius and the validity of his style, an original blend of satire and realism, it proved an artistic inhibitor. How, he wondered, could he live up to this honor?

Dodsworth turned out to be the last of what are generally considered Lewis’s best novels. He managed, against the odds, to quit drinking, but his talent was beginning to fade. He continued writing novels right up until his death in 1951, and some of them were quite successful, notably Ann Vickers (1933), the resonantly antifascist It Can’t Happen Here (1935), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), a radical, ahead- of-its -time story of race relations that won Ebony magazine’s annual prize for the book that did the most to promote interracial understanding. But his days as an influential contemporary novelist were essentially over.

Lewis and Dorothy divorced in 1942 after years of unhappiness, and Lewis spent his last years more or less alone, always looking for friendship and love but alienating nearly everyone with his tempers, his egotism, and his sporadic returns to the bottle. He died in 1951 and was buried in Sauk Centre. After years as a sort of pariah in his hometown—with Main Street he had made it, after all, an international laughingstock—he had been forgiven and embraced as the town’s favorite native son. Sauk Centre, with all the echt- American commercial instincts Lewis had mocked and deplored in his fiction, had turned its most famous dissenter into a product. At the time of Lewis’s death, Sauk Centre boasted a Main Street Garage, a Gopher Prairie Inn, and a brand of butter called The Pride of Main Street. In later years would come Sinclair Lewis Avenue and Original Main Street, the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home Museum.