Sinclair Lewis Wins the Nobel Prize: The First American Laureate

On November 5, 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first writer from the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy honored him "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and for his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

Lewis marked the occasion with a lecture that doubled as an indictment. He warned that he intended to be "a little impolite regarding certain institutions and persons of my own greatly beloved land." His target was the feeble state of American literary culture.

"In America," Lewis said, "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."

To be beloved in America, he argued, a novelist had to flatter. The formula he sketched was merciless:

• All American men must be "tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf."
• Country towns must overflow with neighbors "who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another."
• Wild American girls must change "always into perfect wives and mothers."
• America itself must consist only of New York, inhabited entirely by millionaires; the West, still heroic as in 1870; and the South, "perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias."

What did Lewis say about his fellow writers?

Lewis used the lecture to praise the writers he believed deserved the prize as much as he did. Theodore Dreiser, he said, "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." Eugene O'Neill had "done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly, in ten or twelve years, from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor and fear and greatness."

He also named Willa Cather, Henry Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, and Ernest Hemingway—any of whom, Lewis said, might have won the prize instead of him, and all of whom American critics would have found reasons to complain about anyway. Hemingway did win it 24 years later, in 1954.

What was holding American literature back?

The American writer, Lewis argued, was "oppressed … by the feeling that what he creates does not matter, that he is expected by his readers to be only a decorator or a clown." He decried the lack of institutional support and "the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality."

Yet the lecture closed on a note of confidence. Lewis professed "for the future of American literature, every hope and every eager belief." He declared: "We are coming out, I believe, of the stuffiness of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism."

He cited Hemingway again, along with Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, as writers striving to bring America "a literature worthy of her vastness." Faulkner would win the Nobel himself in 1949, followed by Hemingway in 1954—vindicating Lewis's claim that the generation he championed would carry American letters onto the world stage.