Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home

In Sauk Centre, Minnesota, you'll find the boyhood home of Harry Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lewis was born here in eighteen eighty-five, the son of the town doctor. He grew up in this small central Minnesota prairie town and spent his teenage years feeling like an outsider, a misfit who devoured books and couldn't wait to leave.

He did leave, for Yale and then New York. But Sauk Centre never left him. He disguised it as Gopher Prairie in his nineteen twenty novel Main Street, a withering portrait of small-town conformity, gossip, and cultural stagnation.

The town was furious. Decades later, after Lewis won the Nobel in nineteen thirty, it reconciled with him, renaming its main road the Original Main Street. The house where he grew up is now a National Historic Landmark and a museum.