YMMV / Sinclair Lewis

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In his time, his books got a warmer critical reception in Europe than his native United States, such that, in 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Vindicated by History: Despite his commercial success, American critics in the 1920s (barring a rare few defenders like H. L. Mencken) saw him as a hack who simply got lucky with Main Street, and regarded the European affection for him as motivated by anti-Americanism. Between The Great Depression, World War II, the resurgent patriotism of the postwar era, and the rise of the "New Critics" in the '40s and '50s who emphasized "text above social context", the critical opinion eventually became the consensus opinion, and his own biographer called him "one of the worst writers in modern American literature." By the '90s and '00s, however, later generations rediscovered him and recognized him as having been deeply prescient of many of the neuroses of modern middle-class American society decades before the great postwar expansion of the middle class, to the point of his books being an Unbuilt Trope for Stepford Suburbia.

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