HEROES: Babbitt, World Figure

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to 525,000 copies.) In 1928 he was divorced and soon after married Dorothy Thompson, Berlin correspondent of the New York Evening Post. By each wife he has a child—Wells Sinclair, 13, and Michael, four months. The Prize. Nobel prizes—for achievement in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and Peace—are awarded annually by an institute founded by the late Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-96), Swedish oil tycoon, inventor of dynamite and ballistite. First awards were made in 1901. The five annual winners divide equally the interest on Nobel's huge estate. This year each share amounts to $46,350. Last year Author Lewis testified in court that his 1930 income would not exceed $10,000. The financial zoom his prize money gives him was somewhat spoiled last week when the first Mrs. Lewis, soon as she heard the news, applied in court for $800 per month more alimony. Impossible to spoil, however, is the zoom for Author Lewis of being the first U. S. citizen on the list distinguished by such names as Frederick Mistral, Gerhart Hauptmann, Remain Rolland, Knut Hamsun, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, Sigrid Undset, Thomas Mann.

In 1916 Author Lewis refused the $1,000 Pulitzer prize for his novel Arrowsmith. Last week he accepted the Nobel award, saying: "I feel the highest honor and gratification." He explained "the enormous difference between the two prizes. The Nobel prize is an international prize with no strings attached. . . . The Pulitzer prize, on the other hand, is cramped by the provision . . . that [it] shall be given 'for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.' This suggests not actual literary merit, but an obedience to whatever code of good form may chance to be popular at the moment."

A prolific, boisterous talker, Author Lewis last week showed interviewers some of the bitter humor which once prompted him, after fame was his, to sit through a dinner of Yale classmates waiting for them to ask him to speak. When they did, he reminded them of the scant attention they had paid him at college, told them to go-to-hell. Last week he answered reportorial questions with such replies as these : "Hell, I don't expose things. I'm a novelist, I hope." "I don't know what the hell this coun try needs." "I shall use [the prize money] to sup port a well-known young American author and his family and to enable him to continue writing." He meant himself, of course, but in some places he was misunderstood. Ponderously one Berlin editorialist wrote : "The announcement that Lewis will hand the money over to a ... poor American writer is ... an unprecedentedly magnanimous action."

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