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88 / Budd Schulberg Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was the son of B. P. Schulberg, the chief of Paramount Pictures, and grew up among screenwriters and filmmakers. He later received Academy Awards for his screenplays of On the Waterfront (1954) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), though he is perhaps best known for his novel What Makes Sammy Run?(1941). As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he visited Lewis in late fall 1935. Source: Budd Schulberg, The Four Seasons of Success (Garden City, NY: Double­ day, 1972), 31–53. Nearly forty years ago, when Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, I was at Dart­ mouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, editor of our daily paper and, naturally, bristling with antifascism. [. . .] It Can’t Happen Here was the high sign we had been waiting for: Lewis was one of ours. [. . .] My own enthusiasm for Lewis, and for his welcome commitment to the antifascist cause, was brewed to the boiling point when the avant-­ garde poet and Proust scholar, Professor ­ Ramon Guthrie, a close friend of Lewis’s in those Paris Left Bank days ten years earlier, asked me if I realized that “Red,” as he called him, was living just over the mountain, near Woodstock, Vermont, an easy hour’s drive. Practically a neighbor! The following weekend I decided to combine the pleasure of a day-­ off excursion with some editorial business by driving over to call on ­ Sinclair Lewis and interviewing him for the school paper. Most of my English professors, along with a pride of sophomore lions, put it down as a foolhardy mission. Lewis had become virtually a recluse. His ill temper was notorious. I would find a small army of servants, secretaries, bodyguards, and castle dragons to run me off. “So what’s the worst that can happen to me?” the boy in me countered. “After all, he can’t eat me!” “On the contrary,” said an aging bachelor professor of English who specialized in obscure modern poetry and acidic notes on our earnest literary efforts, 240 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered “I am under the distinct impression that roasted undergraduate is one of the favorite dishes on his menu. I’m not joking, Schulberg. I wouldn’t risk it.” Nevertheless, that Friday afternoon I found my way across the White River and into the trees protecting a large white clapboard estate house a few miles beyond Woodstock. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. I had to knock several times before anyone answered. Then the door swung open and a tall, skinny man with long arms and legs and one of the ugliest faces I had ever seen looked out and barked at me, “Well? What d’ya want?” A small voice that sounded stuck in its throat hesitatingly identified me as the editor of the Dartmouth College daily and a friend of Professor Guthrie’s. “What the hell are you stammering for?” he barked again. “I’m stammering because [. . .] I stammer,” I stammered. “Makes me sound more frightened than I—I really am.” “Huh. All right. Come in.” The house was warm and inviting and lonely and empty. There was a wonderful , long living room lined with books and looking out through a wall of glass onto a seemingly endless terrace that dropped down in a series of broad, grassy steps. I kept looking around, surprised to find no one else in sight. No servants , no secretaries, no wife. “Mrs. Lewis”—that was the well-­ known Dorothy Thompson—“is off on a lecture tour,” he answered my silent question. “Wanna drink?” I followed Mr. Lewis into the kitchen to help get the ice and the mixings. On the way back I paused to look at the shelves of European editions of Lewis novels. I felt a sense of awe and youthful envy. Then we went out on the veranda overlooking those grass terraces, and started drinking together. It was easy talking because we shared, from opposite ends of the telescope of age, an enthusiasm for Ramon Guthrie. “I’m crazy about Ramon,” Lewis said in a voice rather loud for an audience of one. “He c’n do ’em all—paint, fly, write novels, poetry [. . .] The only thing I thought he couldn’t do is hold down a job in a conservative New England college like Dartmouth. You know I got ’im the job. Never thought he’d hold it more’n a year or two. Good old Ramon! Of that whole nutty crowd...

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