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Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale
Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from
job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication and to chase
away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses (and for a time at the Carmel-by-the-
Sea, California writers' colony), he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were
purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one
for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.
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.
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"

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."
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.

Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis' reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars
throughout the 20th century. Despite his enormous popularity during the 1920s, by the 21st century most
of his works had been eclipsed in prominence by other writers with less commercial success during the
same time period, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Since the 2010s there has been renewed interest in Lewis' work, in particular his 1935 dystopian satire It
Can't Happen Here. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, It Can't Happen
Here surged to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling books.

References:
1. Relative Finder, associated with FamilySearch, and the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS)
2. Wikipedia.org
3. Learn more – Sinclair Lewis: The Conscience of His Generation, Sauk Center, MN
4. LDS Family Tree attached
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