Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist of the jazz age. His writing style is realist/modernist. He was won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith which he refused claiming that the plethora of prizes awarded to authors were stifling individuality. He became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature with his novel Babbitt (which he accepted). Lewis also wrote Elmer Gantry, the story of a corrupt and materialistic minister, and It Can't Happen Here, the story of an American facist state.

Lewis studied at Yale University, becoming a a "card-carrying socialist." He lived for a time at "a sort of commune" started by the Upton Sinclair, future Socialist Party candidate for governor of California. By 1909 Lewis was at the artists' colony in Carmel, California, along with his classmate William Rose Benét. Benet would be one of 50 "dupes and fellow travelers" featured by Life magazine attending the 1949 "Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace," hosted by the Communist-front National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions, "dominated by intellectuals who fellow-travel the Communist line," attended by delegates from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and providing "a sounding board for Communist propaganda." When Jack London, the socialist candidate for mayor of Oakland, California, went to Yale to speak for socialism, Lewis met him.