Today in History
November 05, 1930
Up on Main Street
Sinclair Lewis writing career begin while attending college, where his pieces appear in the Yale Courant and Yale literary magazine. For a time, he makes a living writing potboilers for magazines and newspapers and publishes four novels but only meets with modest success until he releases Main Street in 1920. The book—a satire of small-town American life—causes a sensation and presents middle class existence as restrictive instead of ideal. He continues his critiques of American culture in later books such as Babbitt, Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth, and in 1926 refuses a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, saying: "All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards." However, in 1930, he is awarded and accepts the Nobel Prize for literature, believing that the Nobel acknowledges pure literary merit unlike the Pulitzer, which was more commercial in nature, and becomes the first American author to receive this award.
November 2009
Today's Feature History Article
The Writer's Eye
Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction
Advertisement
