Literary Birthday – 7 February – Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was born 7 February 1885, and died 10 January 1951.

Sinclair Lewis Quotes

1. If you want to be a writer, learn to type.
2. The author says one character’s definition of a classic is any book he’d heard of before he was thirty.
3. Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
4. If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil.
5. It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
6. When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
7. There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
8. Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
9. We have the power to bore people long after we are dead.
10. A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.
11. To be not only a bestseller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbours who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias. (Nobel Prize Lecture)
12. The American novelist or poet or dramatist or sculptor or painter must work alone, in confusion, unassisted save by his own integrity. (Nobel Prize Lecture)

Sinclair Lewis was the first American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was known for his satirical works that critiqued American society. He wrote novels about average Americans doing non-average things. He is best known for Main Street (which sold half a million copies and made him famous), Arrowsmith (which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but declined by Lewis), Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry. Later in his career, Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, which considers a Fascist takeover in the United States.

Source for Image: Arnold Genthe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis-Sinclair-LOC.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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