Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) established an international reputation with two of his earliest novels, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). In 1930 he became the first American to receive the Nobel prize in literature. Davidson sympathetically portrayed his friend. The bust is full of energy, suggested by the turn and slight tilt of Lewis’s head and the light-dark patterns formed by the deep undercutting of his attire. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has a terra-cotta example of the head of Lewis dated 1937, and a polychrome terra-cotta of the head with the same date was included in the first retrospective exhibition of Davidson’s sculpture, held in 1947 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., dates its bronze cast to 1937.