LIT DU NORD: MINNESOTA BOOKS AND AUTHORS By Nick Healy
A writer who did the work
on of 1920 first editi " et re St n ai "M
This photo is inscribed by Lewis “amiably” to Chicago Sun literary critic C. N. Thomas, and dated Chicago, October 10, 1922. Credit: Emil Otto Hoppe, 1922
W
hen you enter the Minnesota History Center’s new exhibit about author Sinclair Lewis, you are meant to turn to the right, and if you do, you will find photos of his parents, his boyhood home and Lewis himself as a child — the sorts of things you expect at the beginning of a story. From there, you should proceed on a path providing a roughly chronological trip through adolescence, his years at Yale and his rise as a writer. I didn’t go that route. When I arrived, I glanced to the left and saw the books — dozens upon dozens of them arranged on a long swath of wall space. Lewis wrote 24 novels, the first published under a pen name in 1912 and the last released in 1951, soon after his death. The exhibit includes the famous and obscure among his books in 42 • AUGUST 2021 • MANKATO MAGAZINE
Many of Lewis’ s translated for fo works were reign readers, including this 19 48 Danish language vers ion of "Kingsbl ood Royal." Credi University of M t: Courtesy innesota Librarie s
first editions, later hardcover editions, foreign editions and paperbacks in all shapes and sizes, including three novels that were printed as Armed Services Editions, pocket-size for American soldiers in World War II. It’s an amazing sight, that wall, and it represents an astonishing amount of effort. As I stood in front of all those books, I thought about all the work involved — the creative energy and the physical demands of banging out so many words on a manual typewriter, a task Lewis apparently handled with a two-fingered, rapid-fire typing style. I found myself thinking back to something I happened upon and read 20 years ago — the eulogy given by Frederick Manfred at Lewis’ funeral, which was on a subzero day in January 1951 in Sauk Centre, where Red Lewis, as friends knew him, had grown up. Several bits and pieces of Manfred’s depiction of Lewis had stuck with me through two decades — in part because Manfred was unusually frank about some shortcomings of the deceased man, describing him as a “struggle writer” and explaining how loneliness shaped his life and work. “Writing came hard for Red Lewis. He had to wrestle with it, and out of the wrestling came discipline and the need to work for the rest of his life,” said Manfred, a Minnesota novelist from a subsequent generation whose books had a style quite different from the biting satire that helped make Lewis famous. While explaining that his art did not come naturally to Lewis, Manfred told the gathered mourners that Lewis’ first six novels were “neither distinguished nor successful.” (Six books amounts to a lifetime output for many successful authors, of course.) Lewis’ seventh book was “Main Street,” which, Manfred said, “became world famous and which helped change the whole course of modern American literature, perhaps even world literature.” The History Center’s exhibit, called “Sinclair Lewis: 100 Years of Main Street,” marks a milestone since Lewis
