Sinclair Lewis, Class of 1907 (1885-1951). In 1930, Lewis became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had attained national fame in 1920 with the publication of Main Street, and his reputation was enhanced when the novel Babbitt appeared in 1922.

Lewis, who wrote more than 20 novels, sought to expose the hypocrisy of a contemporary American culture that he believed stifled the spirit. For Arrowsmith, he was awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize, but he rejected it because of the standard that the winning novel “shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life.”

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Lewis continued this theme. “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,” he said. In that lecture, Lewis went on to call America “the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.” He appeared on a 14-cent stamp in 1985.