Lewis, Sinclair

American author and Nobel Prize laureate born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His father was a country doctor and his mother died of tuberculosis when the author was six years old. He learned to read and he started to write a diary at an early age. Sinclair Lewis grew up in the Mid-West, and later described Sauk Centre as "narrow-minded and parochial". The young Sinclair – who was addressed as Harry – found refuge in his father's library; books was a way for him to enter into a wider, more stimulating world. He was bullied at school because of his strange looks and bad skin. At the age of thirteen, he tried to run away from home to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American war, but his father stopped him before he was able to board the train.