Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre on February 7, 1885, when it was a raw prairie town with an unpaved main street and five or six blocks of false fronts. A gawky, sensitive child who achieved little success in school and was the brunt of crude horseplay, “Red” Lewis spent much of his youth following his adored older brother and doctor-father and reading every book he could find. He began writing at age fifteen and, despite years of lost jobs and false hopes after graduating from Yale University in 1908, persisted in his determination to become a writer. With the publication of Main Street and Babbitt, he became a successful novelist and critic of American culture, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. He returned frequently to Minnesota and never denied his attachment to the Northern Middle West, which he called “the newest empire of the world... a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tarpaper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless.” His talent declined, and he died alone in Italy on January 10, 1951; as he had requested, his ashes were brought home to Sauk Centre.