Sinclair Lewis Posts

“Duluth on Duluth”

Back in 2000 George Killough, then an English professor at the College of St. Scholastica, edited the book “Minnesota Diary, 1942-46” the journal of Sinclair Lewis during the time he lived in Duluth.

Reading Sinclair Lewis: Country, Critiques, City Satires

The Minnesota Historical Society produced this video dramatizing excerpts from two of novelist and social critic Sinclair Lewis’ breakthrough works — Babbitt and Main Street. Lewis, of course, went on to become a Duluthian and even kind of almost coined the phrase “perfect Duluth day.”

The program is created and hosted by Craig Johnson and features actors David Beukema, Anna Leverett, Damian Leverett and Melanie Wehrmacher. It was filmed on location in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sauk Centre.

Sinclair Lewis / John G. Williams House

[This post originally contained an embedded video that is no longer available at its source.]

Cade Imaging of Maplewood provides this short, sweeping aerial video of the Duluth mansion best known as the home of Nobel-prize winning writer Sinclair Lewis during the 1940s.

Sinclair Lewis’ Perfect Duluth Day

Excerpt of a letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, included in the book Minnesota Diaries:

What a day — the first in Duluth this year completely of the type known to meteorologists as a p.d., or “absolutely perfect day” — cool, the air sweet, sky ringing blue except for lovely lazy clouds, as idyllic and indolent as a Grecian glade, yet full of energy for people from Chicago … the lake a mirror of many kinds of blue and gray glass, some sleek, some delicately wrinkled …