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19 / William Rose Benét Benét, Lewis’s near neighbor on Long Island, also remembered him during this period after his marriage to Grace Hegger and before his greatest literary successes . Source: William Rose Benét, “The Earlier Lewis,” Saturday Review of Literature, January 20, 1934, 421–22. “Red” wrote his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, and got married. His second novel, The Trail of the Hawk, reflecting his still strong interest in flying—the conquest of the air took a strong hold upon his vivid imagination—dealt in 1915 with a character in some ways the prototype of Lindbergh.54 In fact, when “The Spirit of St. Louis” did land at Le Bourget, taxying to a stop with no casualties in spite of the enormous onrushing crowd, it seemed to me as though an early ­ Sinclair Lewis novel had come true. He had called the prophetic turn upon Ameri­ can history—I do not mean in exact achievement, I mean in the spirit of Ameri­ can aviation. Charles Lindbergh, with his upstanding liberal of a father, with his own Minnesota background, and his own sturdy independence, would have been just the sort of Ameri­ can “Red” could have novelized with vehemence and enthusiasm. In my first marriage my wife and I lived hardly a stone’s throw from the Lewises at Port Washington, Long Island. “Red” and I commuted on the same train of a morning; but I regret to say that his industry in that period quite put me to shame. While I was content to loll in the smoker with a newspaper, “Red” was in another car, secreted from the conversation of commuters, writing furiously upon a new book during the whole journey from Port Washington to New York. Was that The Trail of the Hawk, or could it have been The Job?At any rate, it was when he was still being published by Harper’s, before Alfred Harcourt55 had left Henry Holt and Company to set up his own shop and to become ­ Sinclair Lewis ’s publisher. After jobs with Adventure and the Publishers’ Newspaper Syndicate (under “Bill” Woodward, so well-­ known now as a biographer) “Red” had become editor for George H. Doran. He began to sell stories to the Saturday Part 3. Bohemia / 57 Evening Post, and The Innocents and Free Air came along in their time. I am not, however, sure of my dates here—and the rest is history: how he took “time out” to write the novel Alfred Harcourt believed would be his most vital, how he went to Washington to do it (where Henry Hoyt and I once dropped in upon him at the room apart from his home that he had rented for a workshop), how he produced Main Street with only the motive of giving as true a picture of his own Middle West as a scrupulous artist could give, and then, surprisingly to him, the fame and the fanfare. The simile one instinctively thinks of first for ­ Sinclair Lewis is “dynamo.” He is the journalist par excellence. He has that absorbing curiosity about life with­ out which no great writer was ever born. I was lucky to hear something of that curiosity stated in his earlier years, to be in contact for a while with that keen and searching mind, to have my lazy thinking questioned and exposed by that searchlight intellect. Conversation with him was always intensely stimulating. He could suggest a myriad new ideas in half an hour. And there is one incident I remember well because it seems to me the essential Lewis. Not Lewis the critic of his country, though he has been a badly needed satirist of its institutions and the flame of his rage against our national stupidities has been a splendid cauterization . We were dining together one night, and to our table came a stranger, a traveling salesman, whose conversation I thought a great bore and whose personality afflicted my intolerance. But “Red” plunged into conversation with him. Before he knew it the man was revealing all his characteristic ways of thinking and emoting, as well as giving us a good slice of his life. I can remember that I still maintained a rather annoyed attitude. The type didn’t appeal to me. Then the man left and “Red” turned to me with a most quizzical smile. “Do you like that type of fellow?” I said—or words to that effect—believing my toplofty attitude to be inalienably...

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