In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."

Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).

Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly child—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble making friends and pined after local girls.

He moved to the Carmel-by-the-Sea writers' colony near Monterey, California, in September 1908, to work for the MacGowan sisters and to meet poet George Sterling in person.

[7][8] While working for newspapers and publishing houses he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines.

[9] His biographer Mark Schorer wrote in 1961 that the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history".

[15] It was adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman which was nominated for four Academy Awards.

It was adapted for the screen more than a generation later as the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role.

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.

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 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."

[22] After an alcoholic binge in 1937, Lewis checked in for treatment to the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Lewis immediately became enthralled with the university and the city and offered to remain and teach a course in creative writing in the upcoming semester.

[30] During this time, he wrote the novel Kingsblood Royal (1947), set in the fictional city of Grand Republic, Minnesota, an enlarged and updated version of Zenith.

[30] It is based on the Sweet Trials in Detroit in which an African-American doctor was denied the chance to purchase a house in a "white" section of the city.

Lewis' creation of the novel was preceded by his introduction to the black community via Edward Francis Murphy, a Josephite priest with whom he had attended school as a child.

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.

While working on his novel Kingsblood Royal, he purchased this summer estate and upgraded the Georgian mansion along with a farmhouse and many outbuildings.

Serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant during World War II, Wells Lewis was killed in action on October 29, 1944 amid Allied efforts to rescue the "Lost Battalion" in France.

Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together.Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis's reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars throughout the 20th century.

[40] 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.

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.

In 1960 Polish American sculptor Joseph Kiselewski was commissioned to create a bust of Lewis, now in the Great River Regional public library in Sauk Centre, MN.

Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press.