Every bit as detailed and as thoroughly researched as the Schorer tome, Lingeman’s book provides a far more empathetic picture of the talented, tortured, and ultimately tragic creator of Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and many other novels. Now Lingeman, a senior editor at the Nation who wrote a twovolume biography of Theodore Dreiser, helps to set the record straight. It’s hardly the attitude of an objective biographer, as Schorer’s damning Sinclair Lewis (1963) proves. "I like him less every day, every week, every month, and every year." In 1960, at a writers’ luncheon at Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, I said to Mark Schorer that, having spent so many years working on his monumental biography of Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), he must have grown very fond of his subject.
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