Lewis, Sinclair b. February 7, 1885; Sauk Centre, Minnesota d. January 10, 1951; Rome, Italy
American author who resided in Berlin in the late 1920s. Berlin and Germany occupy prominent places in his writing. Lewis attended Yale University and held various jobs before devoting his full time to writing in 1915.
With his triumphant bestselling novels Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), he rapidly established an international reputation, which culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize for literaturein 1930. He thus became the first American writer honored with this prestigious award. In the aforementioned novels and also in most of his other novels, Lewis satirized and criticized the American middle class and attacked its way of life—its provincialism, religious and moral hypocrisy, money grabbing, conformity, and racial prejudices. As a result, his books have raised storms of protest; he has been alternately maligned and praised. Babbitt was not only his most important novel, but, in the opinion of many critics, his best. The name of the novel’s leading figure, Babbitt, has passed into general usage in American English.
After World War I, some American writers became very popular, not only in the United States but also in the Old World and especially in Weimar Germany. The best known of all was Lewis, whose award of the Nobel Prize was publicized in large, capital letters on the front page of the November 6, 1930, issue of the Berliner Tageblatt. This was not terribly surprising. Lewis’s relationship with Berlin was of a special kind. During his many visits to Europe, he had often traveled in Germany and regularly made Berlin a residence of his, particularly in the years 1927-1928, when he not only contacted such leading representatives of the literary scene of the Weimar Republic as Thomas, Heinrich, Klaus and Erika Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Carl Zuckmayer, and Ernst Rowohlt, but also met the woman who would later become his second wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was then the Berlin correspondent of the Philadelphia Public-Ledger and the New York Evening Post.
Lewis’s marital crisis and the turbulent events of his private life at the end of the
Poster for Detroit Federal Theatre Project presentation of It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis at the Lafayette Theatre, ca. 1936. (Library of Congress)
1920s were fictionalized in his novel, Dodsworth (1929), part of which is situated in Berlin. The protagonist’s impressions of the German capital at various places in this highly autobiographical novel more or less directly reflect the author’s own view of Berlin and his personal Berlin experiences. The retired midwestern businessman, Sam Dodsworth, simply abhorred the “Manhat- tanization” of Berlin, called the city’s architecture disgusting, disliked the arrogant aristocrats he had met, and was shocked by the decadence and moral degeneration of the German capital’s nightlife. He preferred the outdoor lunch at a low Volk Lokal where he watched and liked the Berliners on their Sunday excursion. To the German literati of the Weimar Republic, Lewis’s novels became the very symbol of modern American literature. They enormously stimulated a new phase of the German American cultural relationship and intensified the transatlantic literary exchange. Klaus Mann confessed that it was Lewis who transmitted to him an authentic and plastic image of America. Kurt Tucholsky praised Babbitt as the “American Buddenbrooks,” and Arnold Zweig accentuated in his Impressionen uber Sinclair Lewis (1931) the American author as a social critic unique in kind and of great importance to world literature. Lion Feuchtwanger even went so far as to americanize his name to “Wetcheek” when he published his book, Pep. H. L. Wetcheek’s American Songbook (1928), which he dedicated to the much-admired “good American, Sinclair Lewis.”
Irritated and aroused by the growing activities of rightist organizations and Hitler admirers in the United States and strongly backed by his wife, Dorothy Thompson, herself an unrelenting antiFascist, Lewis wrote at red-hot speed and intensity his utopian novel, It Cant Happen Here (1935), in which he depicted his own country in the iron grip of a homegrown American dictator.
This vision of a native American fascism also was greatly influenced by the book, Fatherland (1935, the English version of Schutzhaftling Nr. 880), a chronicle of life in a Nazi concentration camp, by Karl Billinger (a pseudonym for Paul W. Massing, who emigrated to America in 1934). Lewis not only made ample use of the German author’s shocking prison experiences but also expressly named Billinger and Fatherland in his novel.Eberhard Bruning
See also Huebsch, Ben W., and the Viking Press Imprint; Mann, Thomas; Thompson, Dorothy; Travel Literature, German-U.S.; Zuckmayer, Carl
References and Further Reading
Bruning, Eberhard. Sinclair Lewis und die endgultige Emanzipation der amerikanischen Literatur. Sitzungsberichte der Sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Phil.-hist. Klasse. Bd. 123, Heft 1. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982.
------. “Berlin as Seen by American Writers 1890—1940.” Zeitschriftfur Anglistik und Amerikanistik no. 2 (1990): 112—128.
Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.