eternal in American culture.” Well, eternity is a long time in bookchat land.
In 1910 Lewis moved on to Washington, D.C., which was to become, more or less, his home base in the United States. Meanwhile he worked for New York publishers as reader, copywriter, salesman. He was also selling fiction to the flagship of commercial publishing,
The Saturday Evening Post
, as well as to other magazines. From 1913 to 1914 he produced a syndicated book page that was carried in newspapers all around the country. By putting himself at the center of bookchat, he ensured good reviews for his own books in much the same way that in England now ambitious young writers not only review each other’s books but also often act as literary editors in order to promote their future reviewers. Those destined for greatness will eventually review television programs in a Sunday newspaper, thus getting to know the television and film magnates who will, in due course, promote them personally on television as well as buy their products for dramatization. The English literary scene today is like that of the United
States pre-1914.
Lewis’s first novel,
Our Mr. Wrenn
, is very much school of Wells; it was, of course, well reviewed by his fellow bookmen. In the next four years Lewis published four more novels. Each had a subject, of which the most interesting was early aviation,
The Trail of the Hawk
(1915). Lewis had got to know Paul Beck, one of the first army fliers, and the novel presages, rather eerily, Lindbergh’s career. In my memory these books are rather like those of Horatio Alger that I was reading at the same time, something of an agreeable blur. Since the Subject comes before the Characters and since Lewis was a thorough researcher, there are many little facts of the sort that pop writers today provide as they take us on tours of the cosmetics or munitions businesses, subjects they usually know very little about beyond idle, as opposed to dogged, research. Only James Michener, through hard work, has mastered the fictional narrative as a means of instruction in a subject of interest to him, like Hawaii; and then to millions
of others.
The first five novels established Sinclair Lewis as a serious if not particularly brilliant novelist; but one with, as they say at
Billboard
, a bullet. As a careerist, Lewis was an Attila. In his pursuit of blurbs, he took no prisoners. He cultivated famous writers.
Main Street
is dedicated to James Branch Cabell
and
Joseph Hergesheimer, the two classiest novelists of the day.
Babbitt
is dedicated to Edith Wharton, who took it all in her magnificent ruthless stride.
In 1915 his old mentor Upton Sinclair was invited to assess the product. He did:
You seem to me one of the most curiously uneven writers I have ever known. You will write pages and pages of interesting stuff, and then you will write a lot of conversation which is just absolute waste, without any point or worthwhileness at all; and you don’t seem to know the difference. Everything of yours that I have read is about half and half . . . whenever you are writing about the underworld, you are at your best, and when you come up to your own social level or higher, you are no good.
Nicely, Upton Sinclair adds a postscript: “Don’t be cross.” Writers usually get other writers’ numbers rather more quickly than critics ever do. After all, as contemporaries, they have been dealt much the same cards to play with.
By 1929, the apprenticeship of Sinclair Lewis was over. He had married and become the father of a son, Wells, named for H.G., whom he had yet to meet (Lewis was deeply irritated when people thought that
he
had been named for Upton Sinclair when his father had named him after one Harry Sinclair, a dentist of the first rank).
The genesis of Lewis’s ascent can be located in the year 1916 when he and his wife, Grace, came to stay in Sauk Centre with Dr. Lewis and his wife, Sinclair’s stepmother. In her memoir, Grace Hegger Lewis is
In 1910 Lewis moved on to Washington, D.C., which was to become, more or less, his home base in the United States. Meanwhile he worked for New York publishers as reader, copywriter, salesman. He was also selling fiction to the flagship of commercial publishing,
The Saturday Evening Post
, as well as to other magazines. From 1913 to 1914 he produced a syndicated book page that was carried in newspapers all around the country. By putting himself at the center of bookchat, he ensured good reviews for his own books in much the same way that in England now ambitious young writers not only review each other’s books but also often act as literary editors in order to promote their future reviewers. Those destined for greatness will eventually review television programs in a Sunday newspaper, thus getting to know the television and film magnates who will, in due course, promote them personally on television as well as buy their products for dramatization. The English literary scene today is like that of the United
States pre-1914.
Lewis’s first novel,
Our Mr. Wrenn
, is very much school of Wells; it was, of course, well reviewed by his fellow bookmen. In the next four years Lewis published four more novels. Each had a subject, of which the most interesting was early aviation,
The Trail of the Hawk
(1915). Lewis had got to know Paul Beck, one of the first army fliers, and the novel presages, rather eerily, Lindbergh’s career. In my memory these books are rather like those of Horatio Alger that I was reading at the same time, something of an agreeable blur. Since the Subject comes before the Characters and since Lewis was a thorough researcher, there are many little facts of the sort that pop writers today provide as they take us on tours of the cosmetics or munitions businesses, subjects they usually know very little about beyond idle, as opposed to dogged, research. Only James Michener, through hard work, has mastered the fictional narrative as a means of instruction in a subject of interest to him, like Hawaii; and then to millions
of others.
The first five novels established Sinclair Lewis as a serious if not particularly brilliant novelist; but one with, as they say at
Billboard
, a bullet. As a careerist, Lewis was an Attila. In his pursuit of blurbs, he took no prisoners. He cultivated famous writers.
Main Street
is dedicated to James Branch Cabell
and
Joseph Hergesheimer, the two classiest novelists of the day.
Babbitt
is dedicated to Edith Wharton, who took it all in her magnificent ruthless stride.
In 1915 his old mentor Upton Sinclair was invited to assess the product. He did:
You seem to me one of the most curiously uneven writers I have ever known. You will write pages and pages of interesting stuff, and then you will write a lot of conversation which is just absolute waste, without any point or worthwhileness at all; and you don’t seem to know the difference. Everything of yours that I have read is about half and half . . . whenever you are writing about the underworld, you are at your best, and when you come up to your own social level or higher, you are no good.
Nicely, Upton Sinclair adds a postscript: “Don’t be cross.” Writers usually get other writers’ numbers rather more quickly than critics ever do. After all, as contemporaries, they have been dealt much the same cards to play with.
By 1929, the apprenticeship of Sinclair Lewis was over. He had married and become the father of a son, Wells, named for H.G., whom he had yet to meet (Lewis was deeply irritated when people thought that
he
had been named for Upton Sinclair when his father had named him after one Harry Sinclair, a dentist of the first rank).
The genesis of Lewis’s ascent can be located in the year 1916 when he and his wife, Grace, came to stay in Sauk Centre with Dr. Lewis and his wife, Sinclair’s stepmother. In her memoir, Grace Hegger Lewis is
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