After a series of hopeless dead-end jobs, Una Golden gets married, only to find that maybe working wasn't, by comparison, so bad. The Job was one of Lewis's first successes, and it describes vividly the world of work for women in the early years of the 20th century. This was his third book under his own name and his first attempt, he later said, to write a serious novel. The Job was controversial for its realistic depiction of a woman in the workplace and laid the groundwork for Lewis' great novels of social realism in the 1920s. In 1930, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) became the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award reflected his ground-breaking work in the 1920s on books such as Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 'Arrowsmith', but declined it because he believed that the Pulitzer was meant for books that celebrated American wholesomeness and his novels, which were quite critical, should not be awarded the prize.