Sinclair Lewis Remembered

76. Carl Van Doren

76 / Carl Van Doren Carl Van Doren (1885–1950), Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and critic, earned a PhD at Columbia University in 1911 and continued to teach there until 1930. Source: Carl Van Doren, Three Worlds (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 267–68. After the dinner for ­ Sinclair Lewis before he left for Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize late in 1930 a few of his friends took him away to a smaller party. It was like old times, we said. He and I recalled another dinner in the days of Babbitt when three or four writers had been invited along with Leopold Stokowski4 and a tableful of musicians. Then Lewis, after dinner, organized an impromptu meeting of a Rotary Club. As chairman he introduced Mencken as General Pershing5 with a message from the Army, George Jean Nathan as a representative of the Ku Klux Klan, me as the bishop who had come to dignify the revels. Now he organized an hour on the radio, with a standing lamp for a microphone. I was the announcer and he was most of the entertainers. Like old times. The whole company had the odd sense that there were classics present. Writing books had been the day’s work. Had some of the books got into history? Lewis was conscious of this, as he always is of whatever may be in the minds of anybody near him. He told the Swedish Academy: “There are young Ameri­ cans today who are doing such passionate and authentic work that it makes me sick to see that I am a little too old to be one of them.” He mentioned names: Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder,6 John Dos Passos, Stephen Vin­ cent Benét, Michael Gold,7 William Faulkner.8 “I salute them, with a joy in being not yet too far removed from their determination to give to the America that has mountains and endless prairies, enormous cities and lost far cabins, billions of money and tons of faith, to an America that is as strange as Russia and as complex as China, a literature worthy of her vastness.” ...