Wife Dorothy Thompson

Queer Places:
The Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home , 810 Sinclair Lewis Ave, Sauk Centre, MN 56378
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
Greenwood Cemetery, Sauk Centre, MN 56378, United States

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the youngest of three sons born to country doctor Edwin J. Lewis and Emma Kermott Lewis. His mother passed away when he was six years old, and the following year his father married Isabel Warner, who played a significant role in his upbringing. As a lonely and bookish child who felt like an outsider in his small Midwestern hometown, Lewis immersed himself deeply in reading. He left Sauk Centre in 1902 to attend Oberlin Academy in Ohio before entering Yale University. During his time at Yale, he distinguished himself as a writer for the Yale Literary Magazine, forged lifelong literary friendships, and spent summers working on cattle boats. He graduated from Yale in 1908.

Following graduation, Lewis spent several years drifting across the United States, working temporary editorial jobs for various New York publishing houses and trying his hand at poetry and short fiction. His early literary career yielded several minor novels, beginning with Hike and the Aeroplane (1912) published under the pseudonym Tom Graham, followed by Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), The Trail of the Hawk (1915), The Job (1917), and Free Air (1919). In 1914, he married his first wife, Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine, with whom he had his first son, Wells Lewis.

Lewis achieved a massive national and international breakthrough with the publication of Main Street in 1920. A satirical yet affectionate critique of small-town hypocrisy and provincialism modeled on his native Sauk Centre, the novel became an unprecedented commercial success. This triumph ushered in the most creatively fertile decade of his life. He followed it with a series of masterworks that defined American social criticism: Babbitt (1922), which lampooned the vacuous materialism of the American businessman; Arrowsmith (1925), an exploration of medical ethics and scientific integrity; Elmer Gantry (1927), a scathing exposé of religious hypocrisy and evangelism; and Dodsworth (1929), which examined American marriage and European culture. In 1926, Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, but he famously declined it on the grounds that prizes were restrictive and commercialized. In 1930, he cemented his historical status by becoming the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Despite his professional peaks, Lewis's personal life grew increasingly turbulent. His marriage to Grace Hegger dissolved in divorce in 1928. Later that year, he married the prominent journalist and foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson, with whom he had his second son, Michael. This second high-profile marriage also ended in divorce, concluding in 1942. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis continued to write prolifically, producing works such as Ann Vickers (1933), the anti-fascist warning It Can't Happen Here (1935), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), a searing critique of institutional racism. However, his later books did not match the critical acclaim of his 1920s output, and he battled worsening alcoholism and deepening isolation. In 1944, his older son Wells was killed in action by a sniper in France during World War II, a tragedy that deeply devastated him. Lewis spent his final years traveling abroad, living in Europe as an expatriate, and died of heart disease in Rome on January 10, 1951, at the age of sixty-five.

While Sinclair Lewis was conventionally married twice and involved in heterosexual relationships, his life, social circles, and literary themes intersect with LGBTQ history in notable ways. As an iconic chronicler of American nonconformity, marginalization, and social rebellion, Lewis cultivated close personal and professional associations within bohemian and artistic circles that frequently challenged the rigid gender and sexual mores of early-to-mid 20th-century America. Throughout his collegiate years at Yale and his early days in New York's literary scene, he deliberately gravitated toward nonconformists, intellectual outcasts, and individuals who stood outside traditional societal structures.

Furthermore, Lewis's second wife, Dorothy Thompson—with whom he shared a tumultuous, high-profile marriage—was a pioneering journalist whose own intimate relationships with women (such as her famous romance with author Christa Winsloe and novelist Sonia Sekula) are a significant part of queer literary history. Their marriage operated within complex, modern boundaries that reflected the unconventional social circles they inhabited. In his fiction, Lewis frequently subverted traditional Victorian gender roles and attacked the suffocating moral policing of American bourgeois society, championing characters who rejected standard domestic expectations. His outspoken defense of individual liberty and his fierce opposition to censorship, fascism, and social dogmatism made his broader social circle deeply appealing to the emerging vanguard of modern liberal and queer intellectuals of the mid-century.

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