Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)

Sinclair Lewis grew up in a small town in Minnesota. He did not like it. He spent the rest of his life writing about people trapped in small towns who also did not like them but could not leave.

His prose is vernacular — it sounds like American speech, flat and precise and slightly cruel. His characters say exactly the wrong thing and do not notice. They belong to clubs and attend church and buy the right furniture and are impassive about everything that matters.

Main Street and Babbitt are his best-known novels. They are comedies without a punchline. The joke is the life inside them.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1930. He was the first American to win it. He said the prize was given to him because his books were useful criticisms of America. He was probably right.

His Nobel Lecture (1930), "The American Fear of Literature", warned the Academy that he would be "a little impolite" about his own country — and then was. Read it at NobelPrize.org.