Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951). American novelist. Born in Sauke Centre, MN, Sinclair Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1908. Although he published short stories and several novels in the teens, he achieved critical and popular success with Main Street (1920), which satirized Midwestern provincialism. On a 1921 lecture tour, he regularly praised Cather’s work. He continued with a string of popular and critical successes, including Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925) (for which he declined the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Mantrap (1926), and Elmer Gantry (1927). Even though he depicted One of Ours (1922) as a failure in his New York Evening Post review, Cather invited him to tea and said she was not “a particle sore at him” (#0624). Although they infrequently saw each other in person, they remained on good terms, and when Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, he praised Cather in his acceptance speech. Lewis was married and divorced twice, first to Grace Livingston Hegger and then to Dorothy Thompson. Later, he lived with Rosemary Marcella Powers, whom Cather met. Lewis’s later career was marred by his alcoholism, which led to his death in Rome, Italy.

Casanova, Grace Livingstone Hegger Lewis (1887-1981) (“Gracie”). American editor; first wife of Sinclair Lewis. Born in New York City, daughter of British art dealer Frank Hegger and Maud Gadd Hegger, Grace Hegger became a staff writer and editor at Vogue magazine. She met Sinclair Lewis in 1912, and married him in 1914; their son, Wells Lewis, was born in 1917. The couple separated, then divorced in 1928. In 1931, Grace Lewis published a novel, Half a Loaf, based on her life with Lewis, and later published a memoir and some letters in With Love from Gracie (1951). She married stockbroker Telesforo Casanova in 1933.