Sinclair Lewis Remembered

61. George Seldes

61 / George Seldes George Seldes (1890–1995), journalist and media critic, served as editor and drama critic for the important small journal The Dial and was the New York correspondent for T. S. Eliot’s influential journal, The Criterion. He nominated Lewis for Time’s Man of the Year in 1935. In the 1950s he was persecuted by Joseph McCarthy as a suspected Communist and was blacklisted. Source: George Seldes, Witness to a Century (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 292–93. Of his first wife he made a sort of fictional character; he may have been trying out the stories for a future novel about her. I always had a feeling Lewis never wasted words. He said Gracie came from a simple background, and later when he began making money and they were getting ahead, she had delusions of grandeur. He illustrated his point with this story: One of her high school classmates was in the hospital for an appendectomy. “Gracie called on her and asked the usual question . ‘It was nothing,’ the classmate replied. ‘I’ll be out in no time.’ Gracie then said, ‘I know. It’s your healthy Ameri­ can peasant blood.’” On another occasion Gracie was very criti­ cal of everything Ameri­ can. One of her listeners asked, “But you were born in America, weren’t you?” “Oh, yes,” Gracie replied, “but I was conceived in Vienna.” ...