Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).
Elmer Gantry is a 1927 satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis that presents aspects of the religious activity of the United States in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it. Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, the protagonist, is attracted by drinking, chasing women, and making easy money. In the novel's fictional world, after various forays into smaller fringe churches, Gantry becomes a major moral and political force in the Methodist Church despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions.
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American author, muckraker, and political activist, and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. He wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.
The Jungle is a novel by American muckraker author Upton Sinclair, known for his efforts to expose corruption in government and business in the early 20th century. In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, which published the novel in serial form in 1905. The novel was later published in book format by Doubleday in 1906.
The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists, writers, and photographers in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who claimed to expose corruption and wrongdoing in established institutions, often through sensationalist publications. The modern term generally references investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are occasionally called "muckrakers" informally.
James Mallahan Cain was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction.
Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930. The novel has been filmed twice, once as a silent in 1924 and remade as a talkie in 1934.
Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author.
Iain Sinclair FRSL is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Demian: The Story of a Boyhood is a bildungsroman by Hermann Hesse, first published in 1919; a prologue was added in 1960. Demian was first published under the pseudonym "Emil Sinclair", the name of the narrator of the story, but Hesse was later revealed to be the author; the tenth edition was the first to bear his name.
James Sinclair Ross, CM was a Canadian banker and author, who wrote novels and short fiction about life on the Canadian Prairies. He is best known for his first novel, As For Me and My House.
May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair, a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League. She once dressed up as a demure, rebel Jane Austen for a suffrage fundraising event. Sinclair was also a significant critic in the area of modernist poetry and prose, and she is attributed with first using the term 'stream of consciousness' in a literary context, when reviewing the first volumes of Dorothy Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967), in The Egoist, April 1918.
John Gordon Sinclair is a Scottish actor. He is best known for playing Gregory in the 1981 film Gregory's Girl. There was a Gordon Sinclair already registered with Equity, so he took John Gordon Sinclair as his professional name. In 2019, Sinclair played Drew Cubbin in the BBC drama Traces.
Melvin Barry Hines, FRSL was an English author, playwright and screenwriter. His novels and screenplays explore the political and economic struggles of working-class Northern England, particularly in his native West Riding/South Yorkshire.
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.
Dream of Fair to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. Written in English "in a matter of weeks" in 1932 when Beckett was only 26 and living in Paris, the clearly autobiographical novel was rejected by publishers and shelved by the author. The novel was eventually published in 1992, three years after the author's death.
King Coal is a 1917 novel by Upton Sinclair that describes the poor working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910s, from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner. The book is based on the 1913-1914 Colorado coal strikes. The sequel to King Coal was posthumously published under the title, The Coal War. As in his earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair uses the novel to express his socialist viewpoint.
The Appeal to Reason was a weekly left-wing political newspaper published in the American Midwest from 1895 until 1922. The paper was known for its politics, lending support over the years to the Farmers' Alliance and People's Party before becoming a mainstay of the Socialist Party of America, following that organization's establishment in 1901. Making use of a network of highly motivated volunteers known as the "Appeal Army" to spur subscription sales, paid circulation of the Appeal climbed to more than a quarter-million copies by 1906 and half a million by 1910, making it the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in American history.
Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man is a 1914 novel by Sinclair Lewis and the first to be published under his real name.
Gray Mountain is a legal thriller novel by John Grisham, published in hardcover on October 23, 2014. The book is set in Appalachia after the Great Recession and follows third-year associate Samantha Kofer after the Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, when she becomes a legal clinic intern in Virginia's coal mining country.
