Sinclair Lewis Remembered

27. Alfred Harcourt

27 / Alfred Harcourt In 1919 Alfred Harcourt founded and began to build a publishing company, and Lewis enlisted in the cause. The convergence of their interests led to a mutually beneficial partnership for over a decade. The first Lewis novel that Harcourt published was Free Air, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1919 and the last of his apprenticeship novels. Harcourt also remembered his enthusiasm for Main Street when he read the novel in manuscript in the summer of 1920. Source: Alfred Harcourt, Some Experiences (Riverside, CT: privately printed, 1934), 35–36, 54–58. When I left Henry Holt and Company, I hadn’t any idea what I was going to do. Some jobs in other publishing houses were offered to me, and I had just about decided to take one of them. As I knew ­ Sinclair Lewis would be interested, I wrote to him of all that had happened. He was in Minnesota at the time, for he had given up his job with Doran, and was devoting himself to writing. In reply to my letter, I received a telegram at my home in Mount Vernon, asking me to meet him at Grand Central Station early the next Sunday morning. I decided to drive into town for him. I supposed some developments with the Saturday Evening Post had brought him East. As soon as we got settled in my car, I said something to this effect, and that it was fine of him to plan his trip so that we could have Sunday together. He blasted out, “Hell, Alf, I got your letter. I wrote you a letter, I wrote you a long night letter, and then I said to myself, ‘This is important .’ I drove 125 miles to Minneapolis, put my car in a garage, bought a railroad ticket and berth, and sent you a telegram to meet me here this morning. What I came on to say is, ‘Don’t be such a damn fool as ever again to go to work for someone else. Start your own business.’ I’m going to write important books. You can publish these. I’ve got a little money saved up and you can have some of that. Now let’s go out to your house and start making plans.” [. . .] The first book of ­ Sinclair Lewis’s which we published was Free Air. This was one of the enterprises he and I discussed in that memorable visit in Mount Ver- 80 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered non. At that time, the Saturday Evening Post was just starting to print, under the title Free Air, a serial Lewis had written based on an automobile trip he and his wife had made to the Pacific Coast after he left Doran’s. The serial covered only the trip out and would be finished in three issues. Lewis and I worked out a scheme to expand it to book length by extending the story to cover some action on the Pacific Coast and on the trip back to the East. As it would take Lewis several months to get the additional material ready, we thought further serialization would be impossible, for the Post, to our knowledge, had never printed continuations of serials after a gap of time. However, Free Air had been so popu­ lar with the Post readers that the Saturday Evening Post contracted for the second part. The book sold moderately well—better than his earlier novels. On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1920, ­ Sinclair Lewis brought me the manuscript of Main Street. I took it home to read over the weekend. When I finished it Sunday night, I telephoned without success to a number of places in New York where I thought I might find him. As a last resort, I called the apartment of my secretary on the chance that she might know where he was. She said, “He is sitting on the stepladder in my kitchen with an apron tied around his neck, pretending to help me wipe dishes. I know he has been hoping to hear from you, for he has been depressed and almost silent.” I tried to tell Lewis how greatly moved I was by the novel. “Did I think it would sell?” I said I thought it would have the same sort of sale as Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, about which we were both enthusiastic—perhaps 40,000 copies. He was incredulous over my hopes for so good...