The Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home is a historic house museum and National Historic Landmark in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, United States. From 1889 until 1902 it was the home of young Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), who would become the most famous American novelist of the 1920s and the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His most famous book, Main Street, was inspired by the town of Sauk Centre as Lewis perceived it from this home. The Sinclair Lewis Foundation acquired the house in 1956 and has restored to its appearance during Lewis's boyhood. They offer tours regularly during the summer and by appointment throughout the rest of the year. Description The Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home is a two-story wood-frame building with an L-shaped footprint. It has a gable roof and clapboard siding. An open porch extends across the front façade, with slender, square-paneled posts supporting the porch roof and decorated with brackets and an entablature. The interior contains eight rooms. The ground floor consists of a living room, dining room, and kitchen, the latter of which lets out into a small, enclosed porch. Upstairs are four bedrooms plus a bathroom which featured running water and a flush toilet. At the rear of the lot stands a 1½-story frame carriage house. Lewis residency The Lewis family—headed by father Edwin J. Lewis and mother Emma Kermott Lewis—initially lived in a house directly across from this one on the south side of the street. Sinclair Lewis was born in that house on February 7, 1885, joining two older brothers, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). When Lewis was just a few months old the family moved across the street into this house. Edwin Lewis was a physician and conducted his medical practice out of the house, as was common at the time. Emma Lewis died in 1891, when Lewis was six. The following year Dr. Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. He began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. He began writing as well, sometimes in the garret of the carriage house. Dr. Lewis was a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne, and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home,