Born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. He had two older siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis’s mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble making friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13, he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish–American War. In late 1902, Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance at Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. He entered Yale in 1903, but did not receive his bachelor’s degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair’s cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis’s unprepossessing looks, “fresh” country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewis later became an atheist.

Lewis’s first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis’s first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman’s Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887–1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis (1917–1944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant during World War II, Wells Lewis was killed in action on October 29 amid Allied efforts to rescue the “Lost Battalion” in France. Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and observed that Sinclair’s literary “success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for Lewis’s work” and the family moved out of town.

Upon moving to Washington, D.C., Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, he began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920. His biographer Mark Schorer wrote that the phenomenal success of Main Street “was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history”. Lewis’s agent had the most optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies. In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million. According to biographer Richard Lingeman, “Main Street made [Lewis] rich—earning him about 4 million current [2018] dollars”.

Lewis divorced Grace on April 16, 1925 . On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist. Later in 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont. They had a son, Michael Lewis (1930-1975), who became a stage actor. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they divorced in 1942.

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award, after he had been nominated by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy. In the Academy’s presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that “in America most of us—not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues,” and that America is “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.” He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: “Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

After praising Dreiser as “pioneering,” that he “more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life” in his Nobel Lecture in December 1930, in March 1931 Lewis publicly accused Dreiser of plagiarizing a book by Dorothy Thompson, Lewis’s wife, which led to a well-publicized fight, wherein Dreiser repeatedly slapped Lewis. Thompson initially made the accusation in 1928 regarding her work “The New Russia” and Dreiser’s “Dreiser Goes to Russia”, though the New York Times also linked the dispute to competition between Dreiser and Lewis over the Nobel Prize. Dreiser fired back that Sinclair’s 1928 novel Arrowsmith (adapted later that year as a feature film) was unoriginal and that Dreiser himself was first approached to write it, which was disputed by the wife of Arrowsmith’s subject, microbiologist Dr. Paul de Kruif. The feud carried on for some months. In 1944, however, Lewis campaigned to have Dreiser recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lewis next published Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. The book was adapted for the Broadway stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film version directed by William Wyler, which was a great success at the time. The film is still highly regarded; in 1990, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and in 2005 Time magazine named it one of the “100 Best Movies” of the past 80 years.

After an alcoholic binge in 1937, Lewis checked in for treatment to the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His doctors gave him a blunt assessment that he needed to decide “whether he was going to live without alcohol or die by it, one or the other.” Lewis checked out after ten days, lacking any “fundamental understanding of his problem,” as one of his physicians wrote to a colleague.

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Lewis wrote many short stories for a variety of magazines and publications. “Little Bear Bongo” (1930) is a tale about a bear cub who wants to escape the circus in search of a better life in the real world, first published in Cosmopolitan magazine. The story was acquired by Walt Disney Pictures in 1940 for a possible feature film. World War II sidetracked those plans until 1947. Disney used the story (now titled “Bongo”) as part of its feature Fun and Fancy Free.

In 1943, Lewis went to Hollywood to work on a script with Dore Schary, who had just resigned as executive head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s low-budget film department to concentrate on writing and producing his own films. The resulting screenplay was Storm In the West, “a traditional American western” — except for the fact that it was also an allegory of World War II, with primary villain Hygatt (Hitler) and his henchmen Gribbles (Goebbels) and Gerrett (Goering) plotting to take over the Franson Ranch, the Poling Ranch, and so on. The screenplay was deemed too political by MGM studio executives and was shelved, and the film was never made. Storm In the West was finally published in 1963, with a foreword by Schary detailing the work’s origins, the authors’ creative process, and the screenplay’s ultimate fate.

Sinclair Lewis had been a frequent visitor to Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 1946, he rented Thorvale Farm on Oblong Road. While working on his novel Kingsblood Royal, he purchased this summer estate and upgraded the Georgian mansion along with a farmhouse and many outbuildings. By 1948, Lewis had created a gentleman’s farm consisting of 720 acres of agricultural and forest land. His intended residence in Williamstown was short-lived because of his medical problems.

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. His body was cremated and his remains were buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His final novel World So Wide (1951) was published posthumously.

Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press. The first attempt to collect all of Lewis’s short stories.