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Sinclair Lewis

(1885 - 1951)

Between terms of study at Yale, Sinclair Lewis worked as a janitor at Upton Sinclair’s socialist colony in New Jersey. Celebrating the announcement of his Nobel Prize in 1930, a New York rabbi described him as “impatient of sham and hypocrisy; he loathes smug, complacent optimism; he seeks to prick the bubble of every conceit.” Lewis was the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, having published Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. He died an alcoholic in 1951 at the age of sixty-five.

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Dale Carnegie’s best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence People originated from a popular nighttime lecture he used to deliver at the YMCA. The book lists six ways to make people like you: be interested in others, smile, remember a person’s name, be a good listener, talk in terms of the other person’s interests, and make the other person feel important. Novelist Sinclair Lewis summed up Carnegie’s advice: “Smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.”