Then he telephoned his wife. “Dorothy,” he said, breathing heavily, still dazed, “oh, Dorothy!” She thought that he was ill and asked in quick alarm, “What’s the matter?” “Dorothy, I’ve got the Nobel Prize.” “Oh, have you? How nice for you!” she said briskly. “Well, I have the Order of the Garter!”

The telephone kept ringing, but Lewis managed to dress himself at last and get to New York, where Harcourt, Brace and Company had arranged a press conference for that afternoon. He managed, too, to prepare a statement to be distributed at that conference, a statement that answered the two questions that he had been persistently asked on the telephone that morning: what was he going to do with the money, and why was he going to accept this prize when he had not felt, four years earlier, that he could accept the Pulitzer?

The answer to the first question was that he would “use it to support a well-known young American author and his family, and to enable him to continue writing.” (This reply was widely interpreted, especially by the Germans, to mean that he was going to give the money away to some worthy young writing fellow, and hailed as an act of extraordinary magnanimity.)

Lewis’ answer to the second question was more complicated: the Nobel had no strings attached to it, since the Swedish Academy interpreted the clause in the Nobel will, “the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency,” to mean only that it was not merely commercial work (he did not observe that the clause had been advanced as an argument against a number of candidates, including Ibsen and Hardy), whereas the comparable clause in the Pulitzer will indicates a nonliterary standard of merit. (To demonstrate his point, Lewis listed five American novels, of high distinction in his view, that had not won the Pulitzer; he did not suggest that a large number of Nobel winners, from the first, Sully Prudhomme, on, were of the smallest literary consequence.)

A further difference lay in the fact that the Nobel Prize went to a man for his oeuvre, whereas the Pulitzer went to a single novel, and in any one year, there might be a number of equally fine novels, all but one of which would not be honored. (The Swedish Academy made it clear that the prize to Lewis was determined by the single novel Babbitt.)

Most reporters and editorialists found these arguments disingenuous, and many—most spitefully, Ernest Boyd in the New Freeman—did not hesitate to suggest that Lewis was hoist with his own petard. And from the outset, even before these utterances began to rumble through the press, Lewis was discomfited. The press conference on November 5 was not a vast success. Harcourt, Brace and Company had filled an office with folding chairs rented from a funeral parlor. When Lewis entered the room and sat down at a desk that faced the room, a reporter from the International News Service, Croswell Bowen, more brash than the rest, seized his chair, placed it at the desk, his back to the crowd, said, “I’m Bowen of the INS. Congratulations,” and, his face thrust within two feet of Lewis’, stared intently at him. (The account is H. Allen Smith’s.) Lewis stood up. “Perhaps you’d like to sit in my chair,” he said stiffly.

“Ha!” cried Bowen of the I.N.S. “That’s a good one! No, I’ll stay right where I am. How does it feel?”

“How does what feel?” asked Lewis . . . .

“To win this prize,” said Bowen . . . .

“Well . . .” said Lewis, trying to make the best of an uncomfortable situation, knowing the rest of us were sitting there watching the little drama, realizing that he had to handle himself carefully or run the risk of making an ass of himself. “Well . . . .”

“Listen,” [Bowen] said, leaning even closer to Lewis. “What’re you gonna expose next?”

Lewis glanced appealingly over the room.

“What do you mean, what am I gonna expose next?”

“I mean,” persisted Bowen . . . “what’re you gonna expose next?”

“What have I exposed already?” challenged Lewis.

“Babbitt,” snapped Bowen. . . . “You exposed Babbitt and all the others, and now I wanna know what’s next on the list.”

Lewis was patently irritated.

“Young man,” he said, “I’m not, as you have it, gonna expose nothin’ next. I’m not in the exposin’ business. I’m—”

“Oh yes, you are . . . . I want a yarn out of this about what’s next. Now, come on. What’ll it be next?”

“God damn it,” said Lewis, “I told you I’m not in the business of exposing things. I’m a novelist. I write novels. I don’t go around—”

“A-h-h-h!” said Bowen . . . and, turning to face the rest of us, grinned knowingly and winked, letting us know he was in control of this situation. Then he turned back to the furious winner of the Nobel Prize. “Let’s have it,” he insisted. “What’re you gonna expose next?”

Sinclair Lewis sat and looked at Bowen of the I.N.S. for a long time. Then he got up from his chair, walked around the desk and faced the rest of us.

Someone drew Bowen aside, and the others took over. “It was pretty dull, too, after Bowen dropped out.” But Lewis was irked. To one question, he named the American novelists whom, “beside myself,” he considered great; it was the usual list - Dreiser, Cahell, Hergesheimer, Cather, Wharton, with Thomas Wolfe now added. To another question he snapped, “I don’t know what the hell this country needs.”