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 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 2024 (32.2) includes multiple reviews and responses to new plays based on Babbitt and Free Air, information about a restored version of the film of Arrowsmith, a tribute to Lewis by the U.S. Embassy in Rome after his death there in 1951, and a feature on poet Danny Klecko and his love for Lewis. If you’d like a sample copy, email Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu.
The 2025 Sinclair Lewis Conference
The Sinclair Lewis Society, in association with the Sinclair Lewis Foundation, will be holding 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 will be Dr. Michael Osterholm, professor of Public Health, Health Sciences, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
There will be a variety of panels on Lewis’s work, a trip to the Lewis Family Archives at St. Cloud State University, a tour of the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, a visit to Lewis’s grave at Greenwood Cemetery, and a showing of John Ford’s 1931 film of Arrowsmith, starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. The Sinclair Lewis Foundation will be hosting a historic dinner, celebrating the 1920s writings of Lewis. Accommodations are available throughout Sauk Centre.
We welcome papers on any aspect of Lewis’s writings, life, and times, especially on Arrowsmith. Abstracts of papers are due by May 30, 2025, but are welcomed earlier. If you have questions or for more information, please e-mail Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu.
Download the 2025 Conference Flyer.
News and Events
New 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.