Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was an American novelist and the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930. Main Street and Babbitt made him famous for a satirical, closely observed account of small-town and business-class conformity, and added the word babbitt to the language. He declined the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, objecting to prizes that judged novels by their wholesomeness.