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Sinclair Lewis Newsletter

The two most recent issues of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter are now available. Spring 2022 (30.2) includes interviews with the actors in the film The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis, an article on Irene Dunne, who played Ann Vickers in the 1933 film, and a celebration of the first 30 years of the Sinclair Lewis Society. Fall 2022 (31.1) features a retrospective of the Sinclair Lewis 2022 virtual conference, a speech given about Sinclair Lewis by the noted German author Lion Feuchtwanger, and a review of a new dramatic version of Main Street, produced at the University of Minnesota Duluth. If you’d like a sample copy, email Sally Parry at separry@ilstu.edu.

 

 

The Sinclair Lewis Society was created to encourage the study of, critical attention to, and general interest in the work, career, and legacy of Sinclair Lewis, the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. We seek to facilitate a broader discussion of his writing as a social critic and satirist among scholars, critics, teachers, students, and readers everywhere.

In a series of novels over three decades—Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, It Can't Happen Here, Kingsblood Royal among them—Lewis created and courted controversy and, more important, defined a nation for itself. And his definitions have lived on, long after his own death, in his representations of American life and American characters. As Mark Schorer concludes his mammoth biography of Lewis, "without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves."

News and Events

New Sinclair Lewis Film Available for Streaming

The Life and Loves of Sinclair Lewis, a terrific new 80-minute dramatic historical presentation on Sinclair Lewis, is now available for streaming at https://www.sinclairlewisfoundation.org/life-and-loves. The film celebrates Lewis's life and the 100th anniversary of the publishing of his first bestseller Main Street. Also available at this site is a free, two-part streaming educational series with a downloadable discussion guide to introduce a new generation to Lewis and his writing. The film just won the “Best Trailer” award for the Elmer Gantry clip at the International Stockholm Film and Television Festival. Go to https://bit.ly/365xKIf and scroll to 11 minutes, 14 seconds to see the award-winning segment.

Becoming Sinclair Lewis, a new biography

"How did a skinny, voluble, dreamy, acne-complexioned, paprika-haired, Yale-educated country doctor's son named Harry Lewis from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, become the famous American author Sinclair Lewis?" asks Sinclair Lewis biographer Richard Lingeman in his Foreword to this fresh look at the early life and young adulthood of the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature To answer this question, Dave Simpkins, the newspaper publisher from Sauk Centre, spent ten years researching young Harry's life, from his prairie village youth to the dawn of his world-wide literary ascendance with the publication of his breakthrough novel Main Street. The result is an engaging and highly readable. Free Air Publishing, 256 pages, paperback.

Buy Becoming Sinclair Lewis by David Allen Simpkins, with Sally E. Parry and Jim Umhoefer on Amazon.