The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the prize - Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin. And in 1920 - at the age of 35 - he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention.
This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best - and most misunderstood - novel.
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