Word: sinclairs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Speculative Eying. Harry Byrd's soundings on RFC convinced him that the Eisenhower Administration might well carry out a general program to liquidate some of the 21 other Government corporations, and to render some of their fat back into the Treasury. Last week Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks put up for sale the Government-owned Inland Waterways Corp., which operates barge lines on the Missouri, Illinois, Mississippi and Warrior Rivers. (Inland Waterways, which has net assets of $14.4 million, has been put on the market before, but no prospective buyer has ever made an offer which the Government considered acceptable...
Like a good many other U.S. novelists who get a kick out of posing as intellectual primitives, Sinclair Lewis was much more of a literary fellow than he let on. Between novels he wrote almost a million words of essays, sketches and reviews. In The Man from Main Street, two of Lewis' associates have combed together a miscellany of his nonfiction which contains its full quota of transient fluff but also proves that Lewis had a lively if undisciplined gift for criticism...
...Street is an unpublished introduction to Babbitt in which Lewis discussed his caricature of "the Tired Business Man . . . who plays third-rate golf and first-rate poker at a second-rate country club." But there are other, highly readable things: a sly reminiscence of a month spent with Upton Sinclair in a Utopian-socialist community; a group of sketches about his apprenticeship as a reporter ; a picture of Jack London trying to read Henry James and bursting out with a wail: "Do any of you know what all this junk is about...
...Babbitt, Main Street and other novels, Sinclair Lewis broke through the lace curtain of gentility and poured satiric wrath on the American Yahoo-but later he failed to realize that the fight he had fought was over and won. In his articles he kept shadow-boxing at opponents he had knocked out years before, and perhaps it was this tedious concentration on the bogies of his youth that made his later books seem like watery rewrites of his best work...
What saved Lewis from becoming a bore was his love for the American scene, and his self-perception. In an obituary he once composed for himself, he described Sinclair Lewis as "a cheerful pathologist, exposing the clichés and sentimentalities of his day"-and then added: "It is evident that Mr. Lewis smote . . . sentimentality because he knew himself to be, at heart, a sentimentalist...