Sinclair Lewis Remembered

31. Kathleen Norris

31 / Kathleen Norris Kathleen Thompson Norris (1880–1966), novelist and short-­ story writer, was the highest paid female writer of her era, and her many popu­ lar romance novels are still highly regarded in that genre. She married the novelist Charles G. Norris (1881–1945), the brother of the novelist Frank Norris (1870–1902), in 1909. She met Lewis in San Francisco the same year. After 1910 she published work in the Atlantic, the Ameri­ can Magazine, McClure’s, Everybody’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Women’s Home Companion. William Rose Benét married Kathleen Norris’s sister, Theresa, in 1912, and the Lewises moved into the house on Long Island they vacated in 1914. See also Richard Allan Davison, “­ Sinclair Lewis, Charles G. Norris, and Kathleen Norris: An Early Friendship,” Modern Fiction Studies 31 (Autumn 1985): 503–10. Source: Kathleen Norris, Family Gathering (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 205.­ Sinclair Lewis took Cigi [C. G. or Charles G. Norris] and me to lunch in Washington one day and asked us to come up to his apartment and hear the first chapter of Main Street, which was to set the world ablaze the following year and lead bestsellers for several years. But we begged off; we had something else to do. It was probably the all-­ important business of finding attractive tin cups for ranch luncheons. Red told us that day that it was the great Ameri­ can novel. ...