Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, playwright, and journalist who wrote in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century.
Born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Lewis attended Oberlin Academy, Oberlin College, and Yale University. He went on to produce fiction and other writing as a citizen of the United States, working across the novel, the stage, and journalism. He died on January 10, 1951, in Rome. During his career, Lewis received the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as the Prometheus Award Hall of Fame.
Two of his works by title are the novel Babbitt, published in 1922, and It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935. Both were composed in American English. Lewis's output across the novel, drama, and journalism marks the breadth of his activity as a writer working in the American English tradition.
Quotes by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis's insights on:
Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.
Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.
I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!
The author says one character’s definition of a classic is any book he’d heard of before he was thirty.
Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with a small gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard – in a community where to sport a beard was to confess one’s self a farmer, a Civil War veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus’s detractors said that he maintained the beard just to be “highbrow” and “different,” to try to appear “artistic.” Possibly they were right.
Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere – not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!
Do you think it’s so snobbish, to want to see something besides one’s fellow citizens abroad?
