Sinclair Lewis abides the line-up!
In 1921, the Pulitzer committee unanimously recommended Main Street,
but the trustees of Columbia University vetoed it and instead chose Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1922).
Lewis was annoyed, but he admired Wharton and sent her a sincere congratulatory letter.
Two years later, the same thing happened with Lewis’s next novel, Babbitt (1922);
it was recommended for the Pulitzer, but again it was overruled by the trustees,
this time losing to Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922).
When he was offered the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith (1925), he refused it.
But in 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, an honor that he accepted.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 