A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

Sinclair Lewis in a room he rented for his writing

On February 7, 2010 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, it is 18 degrees but  “feels like 8 degrees” according to Weather.com. This is not so different from this day 125 years ago when Sinclair Lewis was born. It was bitter cold in that day in Sauk Centre (population 2,800). Ice glittered on the 30 lakes that dotted the landscape around the town. The wagon ruts down the mud of Main Street were frozen as solid as the iron-clad wheels that had made them, the ridges at the top brittle and crunchy like exceedingly stale chocolate. The steam from the locomotive of the Great Northern coming into town hung over the rails, too frigid to billow. On that day a baby named Harry Sinclair Lewis was born. No one knows where the Harry came from. Sinclair, the name he adopted as his nom de plume was the surname of a Wisconsin dentist who was a good friend of Lewis’s father.

It had only been 24 years since the first white child was born in the former Indian territory. Harry Sinclair Lewis’ parents did not take his convulsive sobbing any more seriously than they would take any other baby’s. Infants find conditions to be unfamiliar and harsh, but they adjust, grow into little children and naturally find their way in the world. Little did they know that young Harry would find life to be such a trial, that he would eventually make them all famous—or how little they would like that fame.

Sufferer from severe acne as a youth, Lewis did not have the best face for putting on a stamp. But he certainly deserved the honor.

His father was one of the two doctors in town: the stiff and stern one, the one of whom it was said you could set your clocks by. He left his home promptly at 7 am to walk down Main Street to his office. He would leave the office at 11:30 on the dot to go home for lunch and change his hat—always the same hats every day, always the same peg for each one. Lewis’s natural mother died when he was still young. Dr. Lewis promptly married again (after all, he had sons to raise) and the second marriage proved beneficial for young Sinclair. She was as good as a natural mother to him, and a buffer against his father, whom Lewis later pilloried (along with the town itself) in his breakthrough novel of Main Street.

Main Street, published in 1920, lifted a corner of the roof off small-town American life so that one could peep inside and see its inner workings. He wrote from experience. His fictionalized town of Gopher Prairie was easily recognizable as Sauk Centre—and a thousand other towns like it along the American expanse. This is how Carol Kennicott, Main Street’s sprited protagonist saw it when she arrived for the first time by train:

“The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it and no hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain elevator and a few tinny church steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.”

Sinclair Lewis’s success following Main Street could be held up as a triumph of that much heralded American virtue of stick-to-it-iveness. As he was fond of saying: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.” He had an entire file of plots (some of which he sold to Jack London—and some of which London paid for), he wrote five novels before his breakthrough novel Main Street, the novel that many mark as the beginning of his career. But though he spent a lot of time writing, he did not spend much time in any one place. His was a restless life. He worked on a cattle boat, sought work in Panama, did janitorial work at Upton Sinclair’s experimental community, and acted as handyman at a writers commune in Carmel (where he met Jack London) before he achieved fame. After he achieved it he continued to move from place to place to do research.

This being Black History Month, it is worthwhile noting that he wrote a novel called Kingsblood Royal about a white man who finds out he’s part black. He also wrote a novel about the takeover of the United States by a populist leader who turns it into a military state (this novel was repackaged and re-issued during George W. Bush’s presidency). I know of no American writer who has surpassed Sinclair Lewis for pure lacerating satire and dead-on dialogue. As time passes, I wonder if he will yet be looked at as an interpreter of our American spirit or whether, as the nation evolves, his works will come to be seen as time capsules of an American era now part of history.

TRH

Lives up to its title.

Illustrated with full-color photography throughout, A Journey Through Literary America is a book for book lovers – surveying great American authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. Annie Proulx, and many more. Each author has a brief biographical profile combined with breathtaking photography of the places they lived or that inspired them to create masterpieces. A wondrous tour ideal for enriching any literary collection – and sure to appeal to armchair travelers as well, A Journey Through Literary America lives up to its title and is highly recommended.

If you have not visited Steve King’s Today in Literature, by all means you should. Just click on this link. http://www.todayinliterature.com/

Today happens to be:

1) the day John Gardner, poet, novelist and teacher died at the age of 49. He was the teacher of Raymond Carver, who is featured in A Journey Through Literary America. (As a side dish, King serves up a droll story about Jay McInerney taking Carver’s short story writing class.) 

2) The day Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt was published in 1922. Sinclair Lewis is also featured in A Journey.

3) The day James Fenimore Cooper passed away in 1851. Cooper is part of the first entry in the book, entitled “Beginnings.”

4) The day on which I received the first advance copy of the book. It looks fabulous. Pardon me for looking a bit awestruck.

The torch has been passed to the next generation.

July 31

Today we uploaded the files for the jacket and the endsheets. The only element that hasn’t been sent off to Toppan Printing is the layout for the foil stamping on the spine of the book. After two years and seven months of inspiration, travel, and toil, A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA is on the verge of being fully realized. Only a slight sliver of foil remains.

We have seen first and second proofs for the main part of the book. These are called “press proofs” or sometimes “wet proofs.” They are printed on the same paper that the book will eventually be printed on (Japanese Oji White A Matte), on proofing presses that aren’t as large as the behemoths that will print the book, but are still quite formidable pieces of equipment. So, what I am actually holding in my hand is about as good a facsimile of how the book will look when it is finally printed as one could get. Sadly, press proofs are on their way to becoming an obsolete technology, to be replaced by digital proofs.

It still seems like magic to me how, using the bright inks of cyan, magenta and yellow—in shades which seem the opposite of “rich”—combined with black, the printer can reproduce anything from Monet to Manuel Alvarez Bravo—and everything in between and besides. There is artistry, often overlooked, involved in the separation of the colors to CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). More about that later, perhaps. What I should say now is that the proofs are looking very fine. I do not believe I am saying this as a father would say he loves his son. For in the 12 years I have been working at Toppan I believe I have overseen close to one thousand projects, and I believe I have attained a level of objective distance, professional detachment—enough perspective to look coolly on in judgment. I look at these proofs and the quality of the reproduction of the images—and the proofing—looks first rate. I owe it all to photographer and designer Tamra Dempsey and to Bright Arts colour separation house in Hong Kong.

Now we just waiting to see a few dangling elements: the long awaited map, and the front matter and back matter. The front matter includes the title page, half-title page. copyright page, preface, and table of contents. All of these things I knew about but I was always fuzzy on until the wheel turned and it was my own book. The back matter includes the map, the footnotes, and endnotes, a few odds and ends. My father was an English teacher at Rice High School in Burlington, Vermont for over thirty years. He taught term paper writing by the book, with index cards, outlines, footnotes and bibliographies, and trips to the University of Vermont library (which seemed immense at the time) to do research. There was no way that this book, my first, would go without endnotes and a bibliography—compelling evidence of a well-researched work. In fact, at last count, it had 388 endnotes. They are unobtrusive. Just like the two extra buttons a shirtmaker sews on a dress shirt below all the others. There if you need them. Don’t let the endnotes throw you; A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA is not written in the prose of high academia. It is a book about the lives of some of the most interesting people who ever walked the American earth – America’s writers – and the places that inspired them, with over 140 photographs, and hand drawn maps by Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. The book would appeal to anyone from a perspicacious high school student on up.

I am not sure if it was the best idea to start this blog “in the middle of things.” But perhaps this brings you closer to the (measured) excitement I feel than if I had anesthetized you first with relentless verbiage (the term has always made me think that was what rabbits would eat, if they ate words) about the book, its origins, purpose, etc.