Recently, while on a road trip across America, I stayed in a hotel haunted by the ghost of the Nobel-Prize-winning-author Sinclair Lewis. This was in the small town of Sauk Centre, Minn., in a four-story, turn-of-the century brick building called the Palmer House. Lewis, who grew up in Sauk Centre, worked at the Palmer House during his teens behind the cigar counter. The hotel’s website boasts that Lewis’s ghost has since been spotted throwing glasses in the lobby bar.
If you know anything about Sinclair Lewis, it isn’t difficult to picture him as a cursed, complaining specter. He had, by all accounts, a very unhappy time in Sauk Centre. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis to a stern and taciturn physician who didn’t relate to Lewis’s bookish, sensitive nature (“You boys will always be able to make a living,” Lewis’s father once told his other two sons, “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do.”) Lewis was a shy, strange, and often ridiculed little boy. His kind of fast-talking hyper-intelligence didn’t go over well in that farmland setting. He was derided by peers and elders alike for being “old-fashioned” and “queer.” It didn’t help that he was awkwardly tall, with bright red hair and acne all over his face. In 1901, he tried unsuccessfully to run away—hoping, he said, to join the Spanish-American War. He was 13.
In 1920, Lewis finally got his revenge on his hometown with the publication of his novel Main Street. By then he was a Yale graduate, married, and living in the rapidly-growing city of Washington, DC. The plot of the novel concerns a spirited, socially-minded young woman from St. Paul named Carol Kennicott, who is forced to move to a small Minnesotan town after marrying the town’s physician. She finds the place stifling and soul-crushing, the people gossip-prone and petty. Critics lauded the novel as a satirical send-up of provincial small-town life, and the book’s enormous success launched Lewis’s literary career. The book became so famous, in fact, that “Main Street” entered the cultural lexicon as a metonym for small-town life—one used to this day, though its meaning has shifted. Originally, the term was used pejoratively, denoting a backward, ignorant, isolated way of life. It wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s, with the rise of small-town depictions in film and television, that the term began to accrue fond, nostalgic connotations.
At the time of the book’s publication, the citizens of Sauk Centre, recognizing themselves as real-life models for the novel’s more insipid characters, were enraged. The Sauk Centre Herald waited six months before mentioning the bestselling book. But gradually the town came to embrace Lewis’s novel. By the 1950s, Sauk Centre’s real-life Main Street had been recast as a tourist attraction.
Lewis published over 23 books and is best known today for Babbitt—another satirical novel that coined a new American phrase—but outside of the English classroom, his work has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, suburban sprawl has all but done in the idea of a small town with a bustling city center. And yet, Sauk Centre still stands today, its Main Street largely intact. (...)
The Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center sits on the corner of Main and 12th, across the street from a Snap Fitness Center and a Dairy Queen. The squat little building is flat-topped and brutalist, more like a military bunker than a literary museum. A motion sensor sounded like an alarm as I entered the antechamber, where a bronzed bust of Sinclair Lewis’s scowling head was poised on a plinth.
That Friday morning, I was the museum’s only visitor. The guestbook hadn’t been signed in weeks.
“...[O]ut of this setting emerged a man of such independent spirit that he not only started a new era in literature—he forced Americans to take a new, more critical look at themselves,” read one of the museum’s exhibits. “Because of him, America will never be the same again.”
“I mean, his books just aren’t all that exciting to modern readers,” Andrea Kerfeld, the executive director of the Sauk Centre Chamber of Commerce, whose office shares the same building as the museum, told me a while later. She winced a little with guilt. “Frankly we’d do a lot better with a Brett Favre Museum, something like that. But it’s what we’ve got.”
If you know anything about Sinclair Lewis, it isn’t difficult to picture him as a cursed, complaining specter. He had, by all accounts, a very unhappy time in Sauk Centre. Born Harry Sinclair Lewis to a stern and taciturn physician who didn’t relate to Lewis’s bookish, sensitive nature (“You boys will always be able to make a living,” Lewis’s father once told his other two sons, “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do.”) Lewis was a shy, strange, and often ridiculed little boy. His kind of fast-talking hyper-intelligence didn’t go over well in that farmland setting. He was derided by peers and elders alike for being “old-fashioned” and “queer.” It didn’t help that he was awkwardly tall, with bright red hair and acne all over his face. In 1901, he tried unsuccessfully to run away—hoping, he said, to join the Spanish-American War. He was 13.In 1920, Lewis finally got his revenge on his hometown with the publication of his novel Main Street. By then he was a Yale graduate, married, and living in the rapidly-growing city of Washington, DC. The plot of the novel concerns a spirited, socially-minded young woman from St. Paul named Carol Kennicott, who is forced to move to a small Minnesotan town after marrying the town’s physician. She finds the place stifling and soul-crushing, the people gossip-prone and petty. Critics lauded the novel as a satirical send-up of provincial small-town life, and the book’s enormous success launched Lewis’s literary career. The book became so famous, in fact, that “Main Street” entered the cultural lexicon as a metonym for small-town life—one used to this day, though its meaning has shifted. Originally, the term was used pejoratively, denoting a backward, ignorant, isolated way of life. It wasn’t until the ’40s and ’50s, with the rise of small-town depictions in film and television, that the term began to accrue fond, nostalgic connotations.
At the time of the book’s publication, the citizens of Sauk Centre, recognizing themselves as real-life models for the novel’s more insipid characters, were enraged. The Sauk Centre Herald waited six months before mentioning the bestselling book. But gradually the town came to embrace Lewis’s novel. By the 1950s, Sauk Centre’s real-life Main Street had been recast as a tourist attraction.
Lewis published over 23 books and is best known today for Babbitt—another satirical novel that coined a new American phrase—but outside of the English classroom, his work has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, suburban sprawl has all but done in the idea of a small town with a bustling city center. And yet, Sauk Centre still stands today, its Main Street largely intact. (...)
The Sinclair Lewis Interpretative Center sits on the corner of Main and 12th, across the street from a Snap Fitness Center and a Dairy Queen. The squat little building is flat-topped and brutalist, more like a military bunker than a literary museum. A motion sensor sounded like an alarm as I entered the antechamber, where a bronzed bust of Sinclair Lewis’s scowling head was poised on a plinth.
That Friday morning, I was the museum’s only visitor. The guestbook hadn’t been signed in weeks.
“...[O]ut of this setting emerged a man of such independent spirit that he not only started a new era in literature—he forced Americans to take a new, more critical look at themselves,” read one of the museum’s exhibits. “Because of him, America will never be the same again.”
“I mean, his books just aren’t all that exciting to modern readers,” Andrea Kerfeld, the executive director of the Sauk Centre Chamber of Commerce, whose office shares the same building as the museum, told me a while later. She winced a little with guilt. “Frankly we’d do a lot better with a Brett Favre Museum, something like that. But it’s what we’ve got.”
by Matt Ray Robinson, TMN | Read more:
Image Matt Ray Robinson
