Sinclair Lewis Family

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885. His mother died shortly after he turned six, leaving his father to raise him and his two older brothers. A local doctor, the boy's father valued hard work above all other virtues and frequently chided Sinclair, who had decided at an early age that he wanted to be a writer, for mooning around.

Lewis entered Yale in 1903 and wrote for several school publications. He studied hard, but also sought adventure, spending one summer vacation sailing to Liverpool on a cattle boat. Graduating from Yale in 1908, Lewis took a job with an Iowa newspaper but after ten weeks moved to New York. A few months later he drifted west to San Francisco and a year later drifted back to New York, via Washington D.C. Once he discovered that he could support himself by writing short stories, he had time to hone his writing skills and work on his novels as well as travel. Between 1915 and 1930 he visited 40 states in America as well as Canada, Mexico, fourteen countries in Europe and three in South America.

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