Welcome to the newly redesigned Sinclair Lewis Society website. We hope that you will find the site easy to navigate. Please email Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu with comments and suggestions for improvement.
The Sinclair Lewis Society was created to encourage the study of, critical attention to, and general interest in the work, career, and legacy of Sinclair Lewis, the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. We seek to facilitate a broader discussion of his writing as a social critic and satirist among scholars, critics, teachers, students, and readers everywhere.
In a series of novels over three decades—Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, It Can’t Happen Here, Kingsblood Royal among them—Lewis created and courted controversy and, more important, defined a nation for itself. And his definitions have lived on, long after his own death, in his representations of American life and American characters. As Mark Schorer concludes in his mammoth biography of Lewis, “without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves.”
Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter
The most recent issue of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter is now available. Spring 2025 (33.2) has information about July 2025 Sinclair Lewis Conference in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, including an overview of the career of keynote speaker, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm; an interview with Andrea Nardi, the Italian translator of Main Street, reviews of the Washington, DC production of the new play based on Babbitt, and the essay, “’You meet such interesting people on the road,’: Humor in Sinclair Lewis’s Early Travel Writing,” by Sally E. Parry. If you’d like a sample copy of the issue, email Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu.
The 2025 Sinclair Lewis Conference
The Sinclair Lewis Society, in association with the Sinclair Lewis Foundation, held a conference in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, July 16–18, 2025, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Arrowsmith, Lewis’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel. The keynote speaker was Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, professor of Public Health, Health Sciences, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
More information about the conference is available on the conference home page.
Conference attendees received a copy of A Celebration of Sinclair Lewis: An Essay Collection for the 2025 Sinclair Lewis Conference on Arrowsmith, which has 16 essays from past issues of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter, including six on Arrowsmith. There are copies still available for $20, which includes postage. Make checks payable to the Sinclair Lewis Society and mail to the Sinclair Lewis Society, Department of English, c/o Sally Parry, Illinois State University, Campus Box 4240, Normal, IL 61790-4240.
News and Events
Sinclair Lewis Film Available for Streaming
The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis, a terrific 80-minute dramatic historical presentation on Sinclair Lewis, is available for streaming at https://www.sinclairlewisfoundation.org/life-and-loves. The film celebrates Lewis’s life and the 100th anniversary of the publishing of his first bestseller Main Street. Also available at this site is a free, two-part streaming educational series with a downloadable discussion guide to introduce a new generation to Lewis and his writing. The film won the “Best Trailer” award for the Elmer Gantry clip at the International Stockholm Film and Television Festival.
Becoming Sinclair Lewis, a new biography
“How did a skinny, voluble, dreamy, acne-complexioned, paprika-haired, Yale-educated country doctor’s son named Harry Lewis from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, become the famous American author Sinclair Lewis?” asks Sinclair Lewis biographer Richard Lingeman in his Foreword to this fresh look at the early life and young adulthood of the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. To answer this question, Dave Simpkins, the newspaper publisher from Sauk Centre, spent ten years researching young Harry’s life, from his prairie village youth to the dawn of his world-wide literary ascendance with the publication of his breakthrough novel Main Street. The result is engaging and highly readable. Free Air Publishing, 256 pages, paperback.
Buy Becoming Sinclair Lewis by David Allen Simpkins, with Sally E. Parry and Jim Umhoefer on Amazon.