Sinclair Lewis

Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, a small Minnesota prairie town that became the thinly disguised model for Gopher Prairie in Main Street, his 1920 satire of small-town conformity and boosterism. A Yale graduate, he worked briefly for Upton Sinclair's utopian Helicon Home Colony and drifted through newspaper and editing jobs before Main Street's runaway success let him write full time.

Babbitt followed in 1922, and Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, which Lewis refused, protesting that the prize's rules rewarded books flattering 'the wholesome atmosphere of American Life' rather than honest ones. Elmer Gantry, a corrosive portrait of a fraudulent evangelist, provoked boycotts and even a threatened arrest on obscenity charges in Boston.

In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His second marriage, to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, ended in divorce; alcoholism dogged him for decades, and he died in Rome in 1951 of heart disease.