Sinclair Lewis was born on 7 February 1885 in Sauk Centre. An American novelist, Lewis wrote satirical books about American small-town and middle-class life. His novels Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry attacked the narrowness, conformity and hypocrisy he saw in business, science and religion. He declined the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, though he accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, becoming the first American to receive it. In It Can't Happen Here he imagined a fascist takeover of the United States. He was also an actor and had a stormy marriage to the journalist Dorothy Thompson.
Before and after
- 1885Publication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- 1885Founding of Stanford University
- 1885Construction of Anfield
- from February 1885 to March 1885Panjdeh Incident
- 7 February 1885Birth of Sinclair Lewis
- from 1 July 1885 to 2 April 1908Congo Free State
- 23 July 1885Death of Ulysses S. Grant
- 11 September 1885Birth of D. H. Lawrence
- 7 October 1885Birth of Niels Bohr
More in Art, literature & culture
- 1792Publication of Dream of the Red Chamber
- 7 April 1837Publication of The Little Mermaid
- 21 February 1848Publication of The Communist Manifesto
- 18 September 1851Founding of The New York Times
- 1857Rise of Symbolism
- 28 December 1895The Lumiere brothers hold the first public film screening
The era
This moment belongs to the Industrial era (1760 CE to 1914 CE), steam, factories and revolutions. You can also browse everything in the 19th century.