Word: sinclairism
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When the ships tied up and the young Americans filed ashore, there was no row. A band from The Royal Ulster Rifles played The Star-Spangled Banner, and Britain's Air Secretary Sir Archibald Sinclair spoke to the visitors: "Here perhaps you will join with us in withstanding assaults by our common enemy. . . . From here, assuredly, you will sally forth . . . into his territory...
Divorced. Sinclair Lewis, 56; by Dorothy Thompson, 47; on grounds of willful desertion in 1936; in Woodstock, Vt. The divorce was the second for each. Columnist Thompson received custody of Son Michael, 11. Writer Lewis was forbidden to remarry within two years without court permission...
...former volumes Sinclair's characters, skipping here & there like grass hoppers on a hot stove, managed to be present at practically every important event of their century up to the Wall Street crash of '29. Now (1930-34), as the world's disease narrows its carbuncular focus in Germany, Sinclair narrows his, too - though never to the exclusion of the view that the responsibility for Naziism is as broad as the surface of the planet. He manages to whip in a good deal of data on the U.S., England, France; on such symptomatic side shows...
...Sinclair's history of National Socialism sometimes sounds like a newspaper written by a kindhearted, turn-of-the-century U.S. Socialist (which Sinclair is). But it works in keen little vignettes-of a devoted block-leader, of a Nazi composer, of a leftish Nazi-and portraits of Hitler, of Goring, of Goebbels (with all of whom Sinclair's ubiquitous hero talks and negotiates). These portraits fall short of Tolstoy's Napoleon by as far as the whole work falls short of the sublime Homeric purity of War and Peace; yet they are honest, moving...
...greatest power of Sinclair's chef-d'oeuvre lies in its sweetness. This quality makes history far more honest and more clear than if anger and hatred gave their edges to it. Sinclair understands how intimately involved individuals are in the making of history, yet how helplessly conditioned they are by their lives. He understands "occupational psychosis": that disease of specialized thinking by which human beings, in this age, are most inevitably set at odds. That is what makes his characters genuinely tragic symbols. It makes for a sort of sublimity when he can unexcitedly use the word...