Includes bibliographical references and index.

"A monumental study of one of the most famous authors in the twentieth century by one of the most distinguished literary men in America today, Sinclair Lewis : An American Life will stand for years to come in the select company of definitive American biographies. As described by Mark Schorer, the book is "a detailed account of Sinclair Lewis's life, from birth to death, a life lived in many places and full of constant pergrination. It was in many ways a disastrous life, full of sordid horror, and the book does not gloss over that. It was also, in many ways, a life full of comedy and buffoonery, and these too find their place in the text. The approach of the book is not literary or critical; it treats Lewis's books and other writings chiefly as events in his life, and events that helped to form his character. The tone is casual and personal, perhaps slightly ironical. The book attempts to locate Lewis in the American literary scene, contrasting and comparing him with his contemporaries, chiefly people whom he actually knew. Lewis is a prime example of that characteristic phenomenon of American literature -- the man who enjoys a tremendous and rather early success and then suffers through a long period of decline and deterioration, both literary and moral." Sinclair Lewsi became one of the most financially successful authors ever published in America. He was also, for approximately twenty years, the most popular American author -- both here and abroad -- except among contemporary writers, from whom he longed for recognition. He was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet, Mr. Schorer explains, Lewis was one of the most unhappy, haunted, tormented men who ever wrote; he was physically ugly, a failure as a husband and a father, an alcoholic, and -- most tragic of all -- a man who was bother acutely lonely and alone from his early childhood in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to his pitiful death surrounded by strangers in a Rome hospital. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life tells the whole absorbing story for the first time. Mr. Schorer has been given access to Lewis's private papers, his previously undecoded schoolboy diaries, and valuable correspondece both to and from Lewis. Working on the book nearly a decade, Mr. Schorer interviewed well over a thousand people. Commenting on the four aspects of Lewis's extravagant and impassioned life that were of the greatest interest to him, Mr. Schrorer writes : "On the literary side -- the phenomenon of a man who could write what seemed to be absolutely major works of art at the same time that he continuously tossed off literary hack work. The lifelong attempt of a country boy to become a man of the world. Lewis's peculiar need for human companionship and his inability to support real human relationships or to make his closest relationships endure, and at the same time, the willingness of others to endure nearly endless outrages for his sake. The extraordinary fact of a writer who staunchly refused -- as far as one can tell -- ever to take one good hard look into himself."" --,Book jacket.

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